Northern Trust NTRS has joined hands with Accelex, a data acquisition, analytics and reporting provider, to expand the ambit of alternative asset data offerings for Northern Trust’s Front Office Solutions clients. This underpins NTRS’ efforts to digitize alternative asset servicing and enhance asset owner clients’ experience. On similar lines, NTRS had previously rolled out artificial intelligence-powered data extraction capabilities.
Limited partners in private equity firms and other alternative investments are calling upon for better discernments that can be mustered from the huge array of unstructured data received from investment managers. The limited partners pursue data that goes beyond basic performance and exposure metrics to evaluate their investments. Thus, by leveraging Accelex’s technology, Northern Trust can offer asset owners more timely and a broader range of insights. This is feasible since the solution will amplify data granularity and automate the extraction process to provide more conclusive inputs to the Northern Trust Front Office Solutions system.

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Melanie Pickett, head of Front Office Solutions at Northern Trust, said, “By leveraging Accelex’s scalable technology to complement our top-notch service teams, we will provide our asset allocator clients with an increasing ability to ingest, curate, and use unstructured data to lead them to insights and improve their investment decision-making.”

Michael Aldridge, president of Accelex, remarked, “Our data science-led solution automates the often-manual process of extracting data from large volumes of complex fund investment documents. Accelex seamlessly surfaces data at both the fund and underlying asset level, allowing Northern Trust to offer critical look-through insights to their clients.”

Conclusion

Northern Trust is deeply focused on tapping efficiencies through digitalization. Its innovative technology-driven hedge fund administration capabilities are brought to the marketplace via Northern Trust Hedge Fund Services. This provides an attractive proposition to clients. Further, the implementation of the Target2-Securities strategy to provide better services to its clients is commendable.

However, it is seeing an escalation in costs due to ongoing investments in technology, which has been driving compensation and equipment as well as software expenses for a while. Non-interest expenses witnessed a CAGR of 5.8% over the last five years (2016-2020) with the trend continuing in the first nine months of 2021. We believe that an increasing trend in expenses will continue to hinder bottom-line growth in the near term.

The stock has gained 4.4% over the past six months compared with 7% growth recorded by the industry.

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

Stocks to Consider

Some better-ranked stocks in the banking space are Shore Bancshares SHBI, Southern First Bancshares SFST and Colony Bankcorp, Inc. CBAN. At present, SHBI sports a Zacks Rank #1 while SFST and CBAN carry a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy).

In the year-to-date period, the stock of Shore Bancshares has jumped 38.4% whereas shares of Southern First and Colony Bankcorp have gained 68.6% and 11.7%, respectively.

Over the past 60 days, the Zacks Consensus Estimate for Shore Bancshares’ current-year earnings has been revised 21.7% upward. The same for Southern First has moved 13.3% north. Current-year earnings estimates for Colony Bankcorp have moved 15.2% up over the past two months.

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Northern Trust Corporation (NTRS): Free Stock Analysis Report
 
Shore Bancshares Inc (SHBI): Free Stock Analysis Report
 
Southern First Bancshares, Inc. (SFST): Free Stock Analysis Report
 
Colony Bankcorp, Inc. (CBAN): Free Stock Analysis Report
 
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