AI set to transform data as a service for investment managers
Martin Betts, vice-president of commercial real estate, EMEA, at NTrust, said real estate investors are increasingly frustrated by the time and money they spend trying to manage fragmented data, a problem he argues can now be solved with AI-driven tools.
Speaking to Real Asset Media at EXPO Real 2025, Betts said the issue has become a constant theme in conversations with senior executives.
“The question I’m being constantly asked, or it’s just an issue they’re having, is how much time people are spending trying to sort data out,” he said. “Literally, I’ve just come from a discussion with a CEO, a fund manager, where he said, I’ve fed up of paying people to just try and manage data and not utilise it. It’s costing me a fortune.”
Betts said NTrust’s NSigma3 platform centralises and standardises multiple data types and formats so that fund managers and investment teams can focus on higher-value work.
“Our platform called NSigma3 solves that problem, where that problem is no longer dealt with by the fund manager or the investment manager,” he said.
“We’re then dealing with that problem with data as a service, so we are leaving their data analyst team or their asset management team to go ahead and do their day-to-day jobs and not try and struggle with the complexities of multiple data types and formats and whatever from lots of different providers. Freeing them up to do their jobs, that’s what our platform allows them to do.”
However, he said the market still needs clearer understanding of how the technology works and why this generation of platforms is different from earlier attempts. “Education is needed,” he said. “I think people have seen these data platforms come and go. This is different. The AI has been trained on 20 years of experience of all the data that’s come through our business, and that allows real efficiencies in time.”
Betts added that the system blends automation with human oversight. “You do need the human in the loop, but 90% of that time is being taken by AI and 10% by the human reviewer to deliver data consistently, but also correctly as well.”
