Elasticsearch Powers Investment Services for Sumitomo Mitsui DS Asset Management

Code-named ALPHA, the Japanese firm’s asset management system indexes huge amounts of data including market information and news in real time. For fund managers, the ALPHA tool allows them to quickly sort out market-moving news and other data, including geo-mapping data within a split second, to make decisions on whether to buy or sell stock or other assets.

Before choosing Elastic, the company evaluated a host of competing products and services to power ALPHA. The asset management company settled on Elasticsearch because of its superior performance, including speed. When paired with Sumitomo Mitsui’s custom-designed natural language processor, Elasticsearch’s full-text search engine renders sentiment analysis based on news articles in real time.

“While benchmarking on four billion data sets, including structured, unstructured, and timely tick data, Elasticsearch completed the search in about a second on average. It took an average of about six minutes with other products,” said Akihiro Ikeda, a senior production officer in the firm’s IT-Administrative Division.

Geo-mapping

Elastic’s advanced geo-mapping capabilities were critical to the firm’s asset management system. This ability to store data that represents a searchable position on a map allows the firm to immediately identify listed companies that may have been hit by a disaster — such as an earthquake — and to trade on that and other market-moving information accordingly.

“Geo-mapping enables fund managers to make accurate and prompt decisions on whether to trade shares in a company affected by a disaster,” Ikeda said.

Tom Kawasaki, general manager for Japan at Elastic, was excited about another use case of Elasticsearch powering the financial sector. “I’m heartened that Sumitomo Mitsui DS Asset Management, like so many others in the financial space, has embraced Elastic to drive their mission-critical services,” he said.