(Bloomberg) — JPMorgan Chase & Co. is launching a platform to help buy-side firms sort through data in a bid to take on more functions for money managers swamped with information and facing fee pressure.
Fusion by JPMorgan will be offered through the biggest U.S. bank’s securities services business within the corporate and investment bank. Helmed by Teresa Heitsenrether, the unit provides services including custody, fund administration, agency lending and collateral management. It had $31.6 trillion in assets under custody as of the end of March.
“We’ve been in a massive transformation of the securities services business,” JPMorgan President Daniel Pinto said in an interview. “The challenge for the clients is: How do you effectively use the data that you have and enhance it with other data? You need to standardize.”
Fusion launches Tuesday as an interface, allowing clients to sort through data. They’ll be able to access the data on the firm’s platform or within their own applications.
At first it’ll offer JPMorgan proprietary data and then will expand to include other sources. The firm’s approach will be “partner-intensive,” Heitsenrether said in an interview.
“The challenge clients have is that they have multiple providers and also their own data,” Heitsenrether said. “Our ambition is to provide a data-management service with JPMorgan data and enrich it with data clients get from all sources. We’re taking on a function the buy side would’ve done itself.”
JPMorgan hired Gerard Francis as head of data solutions last year. Francis previously worked at Bloomberg LP, parent company of Bloomberg News.
(Updates with additional details in fourth paragraph. A previous version corrected the figure in the second paragraph.)
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