NEW YORK-- January 26, 2023 -- As part of its commitment to improving the client experience through technology and relentless innovation, MSCI Inc. (NYSE: MSCI) today announced a strategic alliance with Google Cloud to build a cloud-native investment data acquisition and development platform, aimed at delivering data, insights, and solutions to power better and faster investment decision making.

Built natively on Google Cloud, the investment data platform will help MSCI create solutions designed to better serve its clients, including asset managers, asset owners, banks, corporates, insurers, and wealth managers. MSCI’s use of Google Cloud’s artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP) technologies—and advanced analytics such as BigQuery, VertexAI, and Document AI—aims to help MSCI acquire, ingest, and process structured and unstructured data at scale and more quickly than ever before. By having consistent data, MSCI can more easily innovate its suite of solutions and unlock insights at speed.

Additionally, Google Cloud will provide MSCI with geospatial analytics tools, like Earth Engine and BigQuery Geospatial, to help quantify physical and transition climate risk metrics across securities, geographies, and markets. Integrating geospatial data into MSCI products and solutions is designed to enable investors to model climate risks by location more accurately and efficiently, leading to more informed analysis, forecasting, and decision-making.

“The investment industry is experiencing an exponential growth in data. In today’s fast-moving world, investors require the ability to analyze new and alternative sources of data to remain competitive and informed, assess evolving investment challenges and opportunities, separate the noise, and improve operational efficiencies,” said Henry Fernandez, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of MSCI.

“This alliance will bolster MSCI’s world-class solutions, helping our clients quickly turn data into relevant and actionable insights across asset classes and issues, such as climate risk. Google Cloud shares MSCI’s quest to advance data measurement and standardization, and we look forward to working with them as we continue to help solve investors’ critical challenges,” he added.

“Google Cloud has a unique strategy for helping customers get insight from their data. We enable customers to analyze structured and unstructured data in one system, and unify data lakes, data warehouses, and machine learning into a single platform,” said Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud. “Our collaboration with MSCI will enable it to build an intelligent, cloud-native data platform that will improve the way its customers can make investment decisions.”

“We are pleased to join forces with Google Cloud to build a best-in-class AI and NLP-driven investment data platform that will help our research team accelerate its ability to create analytical products that power the financial markets,” said Jigar Thakkar, Chief Technology Officer of MSCI. “Combined with our broader suite of technology initiatives, this marks another step toward our mission to help our clients align their portfolios with their investment objectives through relevant data and advanced technology.”