London, Birmingham. 30th October 2018. Geospatial Insight, a leading provider of independent research derived from the analysis of satellite, aerial and drone imagery, is pleased to announce that financial services industry and quant community veteran Steve Wilcockson has joined the company. Responsible for GeoFinance Market Development, Steve will drive client-facing activities for all Geospatial Insight Finace Sector products and will lead product management for RetailWatch, a consumer sentiment analysis dataset.
Steve was formerly Global Industry Manager for Financial Services at the engineering software company MathWorks, developers of MATLAB™, where he worked for over 20 years among model builders and implementers including quants, quant developers, economists, actuaries, algo traders, portfolio managers and risk managers. With a background in Geography, Steve holds Masters degrees from the University of Cambridge and the University of British Columbia.
Steve commented, “I am a passionate exponent of GeoFinance, the notion that quantitative finance models and data analytics can better account for and incorporate geographical contingency.” Adding, “I am looking forward to working with a great team at Geospatial Insight contributing to the incorporation of geospatial imagery within the rapidly emerging alternative data universe for financial services.”
Dan added that Steve’s appointment is highly strategic to Geospatial Insight, given that the firm is also the UK distributor for Hexagon Geospatial software. “In the future, we expect quant firms to start making use of raw imagery, which along with Hexagon software and the licensing of our imagery processing algorithms, may enable funds to create their own research and differentiated alpha”, he said.