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Northern Trust (NTRS) Enters Into Agreement With Two Sigma

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With a view to enhance clients’ experience, Northern Trust (NTRS - Free Report) has inked an agreement with Two Sigma to offer Venn, a cloud-based investment analytics platform, to its customers.

The move will help Northern Trust integrate products, services and technology across the whole office. Moreover, as asset allocators aim to drive performance and cut costs, this Whole Office ‘platform’ approach is likely to help optimize the front office investment process.

Also, it will enable the company to provide asset allocators with enhanced portfolio insights and analytics designed to help investment teams make more confident asset allocation, manager selection and quantitatively driven investment decisions.

Also, Venn will help investment teams to have clearer understanding of investment risks and opportunities across a diversified multi-asset portfolio, delivered through modern, cloud-based software.

With this deal, clients of Northern Trust will be able to access Venn and take advantage of advanced portfolio analytics tools.

"Our Whole Office ecosystem delivers global asset allocators and asset managers scale, efficiency, flexibility and optionality, ultimately enabling more informed investment decision making," said Pete Cherecwich, president of corporate & institutional services at Northern Trust.

He added, “We believe that the combined expertise and synergies across our two organizations will improve operational efficiency and analytical capabilities for our mutual clients."

Our Take

Northern Trust has been continuously trying to enhance digital offerings in order to meet the changing consumer demand, especially amid the pandemic. Also, its implementation of expense reduction initiatives and strategic additional efforts to improve productivity are anticipated to yield positive results. However, low interest rate environment poses a concern.

The stock has gained 15.2% in the past six months compared with the industry’s growth of 39.9%.

The stock presently carries a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold). You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.

With the growing demand for digitization, companies have been making investments to ensure availability to clients. In February, Goldman (GS - Free Report) launched an automated wealth-management platform called Marcus Invest as part of a move to expand its suite of consumer financial offerings within its digital consumer lending unit, Marcus.

In January 2021, JPMorgan (JPM - Free Report) announced plans to launch a digital retail bank in the U.K. in the coming months. Under the Chase brand, the company will offer products and features customized to meet clients’ needs, which will be delivered through an innovative mobile app. In October 2020, Bank of America (BAC - Free Report) launched its digital financial planning tool — Life Plan. Customers will be able to access the Life Plan program through the bank’s mobile app and website.

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