Our morning market briefing used to take the best part of two hours to compile by hand. Yesterday it took twelve minutes. Same output, better coverage.
Here is what ran in that time.
Live five year SONIA swap rates, pulled and mapped against current all in senior debt benchmarks. UK REIT announcements, filtered against the holdings in client portfolios so that only material changes came through rather than the whole wire. And a 5,000 deal database queried for funds approaching forced exit windows, based on vintage year and the lifecycle points where that pressure usually shows up.
By nine o’clock the context is ready. The conversation with clients is about what to do with it, not about what it says.
The compilation was never the value
It is tempting to describe this as a data advantage, and it is not one. Everyone in this market has access to the same feeds. Swap rates are public. RNS announcements are public. Fund vintages are a matter of record. Nobody is winning because they found a source somebody else missed.
What differs is the split of the morning. Two hours of compilation and twenty minutes of thinking is a normal working pattern in this industry, and it is the wrong way round. The compilation is mechanical, repetitive and completely specified: fetch this, filter against that, flag the ones that cross a threshold. It is the part of the job that most deserves to be automated and usually the last part anyone gets to.
“Nobody is short of information before nine o’clock. They are short of the time to have read it.”
Teddy James, Tercero Analytics
What twelve minutes buys
Not a shorter morning. A different one. The hour and a half that came back does not disappear into the diary, it goes into the part of the brief that only a person can write: which of these movements actually matters to this client, this week, given what they were worried about on the last call.
That is also the honest limit of it. The system does not decide what is material. It narrows several thousand lines down to the twenty that could be, and it shows its working so you can disagree with any of them. Judgement stays where it was.