It is reliable, it is fast and it is available,” he says. “So if I look towards 2025, data will be at the fingertips of portfolio managers. He says it is about giving investment professionals access to proprietary, high-quality data quickly and efficiently so that it can inform their investment decisions. The investment skills are the heart of our industry and something like Python is supporting that.” “There will be Python programmers working in the teams and some portfolio managers might have Python skills, but it doesn’t have to be all individuals. “We think investment skills are very important and, yes, technology skills will be important, but it doesn’t mean that all portfolio managers need to be Python programmers,” de Zwart says.
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This doesn’t mean every investment professional has to become proficient in the computer languages used in data science, such as Python or R, but he does expect portfolio managers to understand how various tools can be applied to leverage the data hub APG is building. He wants each investment team to develop a digital mindset so that the portfolio managers are in charge of their own digital direction. “Only if the business value is sufficient, we will commence scale-up and otherwise we will stop the pilot and look for a better way to use our resources.” Digital Mindsetĭe Zwart says it is important APG’s data efforts are owned by the investment teams and not simply delegated to the IT department.
So it is either about efficiency, sustainable investing or investment returns and each pilot will be assessed on these dimensions,” he says. “Digitalisation is not the goal it is the business value that comes from this digitalisation. He points out the goal is not simply the digitalisation of information, but the value this brings to the overall fund. Every time there will be several pilots and in parallel we will have several scale-ups from the previous year.” So we have a very long list of new pilot ideas. “What we are looking for is to start a pilot in one year, scale it up in the next year and then move on. “So for fixed income, for example, we went from zero users to about 20 portfolio managers, or 50 per cent of the portfolio managers, working with this database. The investment teams already are involved in the pilots and for this year we would like to scale up those pilots to a mature level,” de Zwart says. In 2021, we did a lot of the groundwork, which included building the data shop, data availability, but also blueprints. “It is a five-year program that started in 2021. In addition, APG runs three other pilot programs in relation to data: fixed income, alternative data and risk.
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“Responsibility and sustainability have evolved over time for pension funds and we are going to do a full digital refresh and will have a golden copy in place that is the central truth for all the teams at APG, not only the investment teams, but also for the reporting and risk management department.” “The key priority is to get a responsible investment hub in place that forms a golden copy of all the data that is related to sustainability at the fund,” Gerben de Zwart, Head of Investment Solutions at APG Asset Management, tells Insights in a video call. This latter objective is the focus of the fund’s main pilot program, currently underway. The asset manager has three objectives in mind in relation to building this hub: to increase efficiency across the €620 billion (A$916 billion) fund, enhance investment returns and obtain an information advantage in responsible investment. Dutch asset manager APG is building its own centralised data hub so its investment teams can steer the direction of how data science influences investment decisions.ĪPG Asset Management, the investment arm of several Dutch pension funds, including ABP and bpfBOUW, is building an internal data hub that will allow its investment team access to information and data science tools in one central place in the system.
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