Modern investor tools (5): Blue Lion, or AI for alternative investments

A new series on technology providers that assist asset allocators.

Blue Lion Research, a City of London Fintech company, is bringing in artificial intelligence (AI) to provide deeper analysis for investors and managers.

For investors, the firm assesses operational criteria, clauses and features of legal documents, and provides comparison with peers and response to market conditions. And for managers, they evaluate differentiation and provide a better understanding of their fund universe. Their new product launched in August 2016 after two years of research and development. Co-founder Grant Fuller talks to Opalesque.

Opalesque: How did you get started?

Grant Fuller: The whole process started when we originally were having a conversation with some institutional investors who were saying that over time, they were becoming increasingly head-count pressured: they didn't have as many analysts at their disposal as they used to, but they were still being inundated with more and more soliciting funds.

And the idea was floated that the rise in machine learning and AI might offer a nice solution.

So we did some some research and it turned out this indeed was the case. It is possible to take data gathered from funds, from markets and data collected from institutional investors, and put those three components into a machine learning and AI environment and have the machine identify relationships between funds and the markets, but also between the funds and the investors. That was not possible or obvious previously.

Of course, the machine can do this much faster than a human analyst can. The goal here was not to produce robo trading for hedge funds. The goal was to make it possible for an in......................

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This article was published in Opalesque's New Managers a top-down monthly analysis, news and research publication on the global emerging manager space.