Greetings from Guiyang.

This month’s tidbits will focus on our recent data reconnaissance trip to the Big Data Exposition in Guiyang, a city which is rapidly becoming known as the ‘data valley’ of China.

For us, it was a busy three days. As well as presenting at the expo (where our main aim was to educate the audience in terms of how their data could be useful to the investment world), we also spoke to well over 100 companies that we identified as potential data vendors for our clients.

Here are some of the most interesting takeaways from the event:

1. A Greenfield for Alternative Data

As we had expected (and hoped), the event was awash with interesting data providers, hardly any of whom were targeting financial services clients. We quickly discovered this was simply due to a lack of awareness regarding the alt data investment use case.