Updated: Apr 13
There have been quite a few stories over the past few years about Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan giving access to their powerful in-house platforms – SecDB and Athena, respectively – to their clients.
We at Beacon welcome this exciting industry trend of empowering quantitative developers. We also know how tricky it is to open up in-house platforms because my co-founder Kirat Singh and I designed, built, and used them for sixteen years prior to launching Beacon.
Goldman’s and JP Morgan’s recent steps towards opening up API access to some of their data and analytics will certainly add value to their clients. But there are two key limitations: clients must run analytics on the bank’s infrastructure, not their own; and clients can only access applications, not the bank’s actual in-house developer platform.
We founded Beacon in 2014 to build the next-generation platform that solves both of these problems. Beacon was designed from the beginning to make it easy to spin up securely segregated sandboxes for clients. And a Beacon license comes with the full stack developer platform that powers our applications.
This article offers a peek under the hood of what banks are really doing – and introduces Beacon as an alternative way to externalize in-house technology.
What Are the Banks Really Doing?
For example, Goldman’s Marquee is a website where clients can access market data, portfolio information, research, and some of the internal analytics that are implemented in SecDB. Clients use web applications that ultimately run their calculations on servers inside Goldman running SecDB. Goldman also recently open-sourced software around API access to those same services.
JPMorgan is doing a similar thing with Athena, letting custody clients run Athena’s analytics on their portfolios to give them advanced risk and pricing information.
An important distinction, though, is that neither Goldman nor JPMorgan are giving their clients the actual developer tools that they use internally – just end-user applications. That means clients have to give their data to the banks to run those calculations.
Giving out their developer tools, as it turns out, is quite difficult for them, because SecDB and Athena (as well as Bank of America’s Quartz, another similar platform) are monolithic in-house software, and spinning up securely segregated sandboxes is something that they just weren’t designed to do. That design decision was early and deep and is very difficult to change. Supporting a lot of client-specific sandbox environments is too expensive to be commercial.
Is There Another Way?
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