#FORGESOFT Editor
#FORGESOFT team was approached by a prominent hedge fund to help with their business growth and to seize the opportunity to capitalize on relevant market data built into the workflow and established trading processes.
Although the hedge fund was highly profitable, the client aimed to identify new opportunities within the market and their industry. They recognized the need to leverage available data — currently not consolidated on their premises — to generate stronger execution signals and implement more differentiating strategies.
Problem statement and requirements
To successfully expand its team of traders and associates, the firm urgently needed to strengthen its technological platform — an essential step to attract top-tier investors and allocators and solidify its position as a market leader.
Critical requirements for projects were:
- Design and implement reliable data ingestion and storage on the company’s premises
- Backfill historical data and design the system to allow backfills in the case of problematic ingestions
- Introduce reliable monitoring and alerting systems for data ingestion and data quality.
- Introduce security access controls for data models at different levels of traders
- Integrate with a commonly used trading tool, 3Forge
- Enable data discoverability with AI tools (English to SQL system via Claude)
Beyond core data initiatives, the firm established a comprehensive set of additional requirements designed to drive substantial business growth and meaningfully elevate the day-to-day experience for all internal stakeholders. These measures called for the strategic implementation of advanced product development tools and systems that would fundamentally transform team operations.
By introducing a modern CRM platform, robust knowledge-sharing solutions, cutting-edge AI integrations, seamless data capture mechanisms, and automated meeting recorders, the firm aimed to foster collaboration, streamline decision-making, and empower staff to work more effectively and efficiently at every level.
Such ambitious enhancements were critical to creating a future-ready organizational ecosystem that supports innovation, agility, and sustainable competitive advantage.
Challenges and obstacles
As an initial stage of any project, the #FORGESOFT team spent a couple of days with the fund founders, deep diving into the problem and analyzing the most critical challenges the company and the #FORGESOFT team would need to solve. Here are the most important items that we considered before starting the engagement.
Ultra-lean team with huge responsibilities
It’s not uncommon for the industry to have only a few core members focusing on trading and executing the fund strategy. Along with two co-founders, there were only a few other team members working on multiple internal initiatives while also being heavily involved in trading and corporate management activities.
The team lacked software engineers or system administrators to run the in-house infrastructure.
Absence of any technologies in-house
Historically, the firm used multiple SAS solutions that are common in financial services and trading companies. There are no built-in automation or systems capable of consuming data and presenting it in structured, yet consumable, reports for end users. Most of the things were done manually, which made it prone to multiple mistakes.
Infrastructure maintainable by a handful of engineers
Contracted systems were available to the team, but without in-house technology and IT teams, it was hard to communicate with external engineers to maintain integrations at a decent level that could scale as headcount and assets under management grew.
Rigid institutional partners’ technologies
The integrations with financial institutions and hedge funds relied on outdated technologies by modern IT standards. Many processes used FTP, requiring manual file uploads and downloads for communication. These solutions were frequently unreliable and might result in inconsistent signal outputs.
Unreliable data sources and complex structures
The format and structure of the CSV files and Excel spreadsheets uploaded to FTPs or sent via HTTP were inconsistent and changed over time. Some of the files were found to have been compiled manually, with multiple errors and misplaced columns, making them hard for humans to manage.
Considerations and Solutioning
The team immediately set to work, rigorously analyzing the problem statement and critical requirements through multiple iterations. Rather than settling for quick fixes, #FORGESOFT developed a comprehensive range of solutions and clearly communicated the trade-offs and long-term implications to the senior management. This deliberate, thorough approach resulted in the launch of a robust, future-proof system that addresses every key challenge.
Team staffing and augmentation
The silver lining in the discussion about team extension and in-house development capacity was the desire to keep the company lean and ensure the system handling the data is reliable and supported by #FORGESOFT engineering capacities.
The project started with extensive architecture discussions and consulting. The hedge fund was provided with fractional CTO and architect services, along with part-time data engineering capacity. After the initial stage, the company’s team was augmented with a full-time data engineer to define the design details and develop pipelines to collect and store data using the selected solutions.
Partner and investor trust in technology
In addition to deploying reliable technologies and services during the development of the hedge fund’s data warehouse, another essential requirement was ensuring that all critical systems and infrastructure components came from leading technology providers — such as Google, Amazon, and Microsoft. Meeting this standard was key to building and maintaining the trust of both investors and partners. As a result, the team carefully evaluated each step of the data warehouse implementation to confirm the use of only first-tier solutions.
Throughout the process, the team provided strategic guidance to ensure the company implemented internationally recognized security controls, with a strong emphasis on robust risk management and strict data access measures. Drawing on deep certification expertise, we insisted on aligning with ISO 27001 and SOC 2 best practices — an approach that not only addresses current risks but powerfully demonstrates to prospective institutions and clients that the firm meets the highest standards of security and compliance.
Reliability of data quality
The system’s architecture included intermediary checks and tree-like logic to handle different versions of the data structures. The solution’s design included a few layers of data structures stored on the customers’ premises.
- “Bronze” level would include raw data and information about the files and imports into the data lake.
- “Silver” level would include extracted data from the files and raw structures.
- “Gold” level would have clean, normalized, deduplicated data, which would then be used to build signals and feed the data models for traders and associates.
This structure allowed idempotent imports and data fixes to be performed when any error was detected. It was also designed to sustain changes to the raw data models and to retain a history of those changes for future analysis and pipeline optimization.
Data availability, consistency, and monitoring
Monitoring and alerting systems were embedded in the solution by design at different levels, starting from data availability and quality, which can be easily checked with simple queries in Metabase, through deeper levels of scheduler and infrastructure monitoring and alerting escalations. The escalation policies were designed to involve multiple stakeholders to achieve a reasonable resolution time. All the alerts were split into the following priorities: P0-P4.
During the first months of use, the system could detect and address data discrepancies that would otherwise go unnoticed to the naked eye. There were also problems if data providers were detected and escalated in a timely manner. Those problems usually involved the absence of new files on FTP servers or a lack of data in the requested time frames.
Security and data access segregation
In addition to foundational security and advanced perimeter protections such as zero trust infrastructure, VPNs, and antivirus software, we went further to ensure data security remains uncompromised at every level.
Our team engineered highly granular data mart access controls, empowering each trader with immediate, role-based access only to the precise data and visualization needed to execute their trading strategies — no more, no less. This rigorous approach not only safeguards sensitive information but also sets a new standard for operational security and accountability within the organization.
Results and conclusions
Within just a few months of going live, the system has delivered transformative value, quickly establishing itself as one of the company’s most impactful technology investments. By enabling secure data access, complete ownership of core business analytics, real-time visualization, and dynamic strategy manipulation, the solution has empowered traders with unprecedented agility and insight. The tailored dashboards not only accelerated business growth and operational confidence but also positioned the firm at the forefront of innovation , fully prepared to lead in the next era of fintech solutions.
“Rolling out this data platform has truly elevated our operations. The secure, intuitive dashboards put real-time, actionable insights in our traders’ hands, allowing us to act with greater speed and assurance by data. It’s not just an upgrade — this platform has sharpened our competitive edge and raised our expectations for technology going forward” — Director of the Fund
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Reliable Data Flow for the Hedge Fund was originally published in #FORGESOFT on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
