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Stop calling them clients
Matt Ober
October 16, 2024
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Stop calling internal people clients. It’s a mindset change, but necessary!
I have heard from many people that sit in a Data Strategy or Data Sourcing or Chief Data Officer role and they are always talking about their clients. The analysts or PM’s or someone within the firm are their clients. WHY? Why are they your clients? Aren’t you on the same team? The data team is bringing insights into portfolio decision-making. If you want to be in a support role then sure, you can call them clients. But if you want to take the data science team or data sourcing efforts seriously, and make it part of the investment process and investment decision-making, then stop calling people within the firm clients. They are your colleagues. Your insights you are bringing are just as valuable as the model they are building or the transcripts they are reading. Your insights are giving the investment team better entry points, uncovering new investment opportunities, and is key to a lot of the investment thesis.
Maybe this is harder within a multi-manager hedge fund where there are hundreds of teams sharing a data team resource and there is no dedicated person per team. But in a single fund structure, there is no excuse. The best-performing managers see the data team, data science effort, and data insights as part of what sets them apart from the competition. If the leaders of these data teams act like they have to support ‘their clients’ then they are always going to be glorified market data analysts. They will always be viewed as middle or back office. You need to change the culture and change the perception. Analysts and PM’s are not clients, they are teammates or colleagues you are working with to drive returns for the fund.
The hedge fund industry has notoriously taken care of the money makers, the most successful PM’s, and analysts. They are highly recruited. They are paid handsomely and given lots of leeway even if they crush internal culture. I have seen it many times. Few in the data space have cracked into the inner circle and these days it feels like the industry is taking a step back. Pushing the data teams further into back-office support roles. We need data leaders that aren’t scared of being fired. That have a vision and know that they belong. The best firms have the strongest cultures and to really succeed at integrating data or alternative data into an investment process, you need to put the data team on the same footing as the investment team, in the same room, with the same opportunity to voice their opinion. I look forward to seeing the next leaders in data crack the inner circle and have a voice to push these changes.
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