Bloomberg's alt-data head is starting up a new business at retail consultant Ascential - and it shows how firms can cut out middlemen and sell information directly to hedge funds

• Ascential Alternative Data Division was started by Jeremy Baksht, who used to be Bloomberg's global head of alternative data. The London-based company helps consumer companies, like clothing lines, understand everything from their brand to their customers to their price points.
• The new division will focus on selling the datasets already created for the firm's primary clients to hedge funds and private-equity managers, while also building up a data-science and analysis team to create new data products.
• "Most hedge funds and financial services clients are not trying to do a bottoms-up, fundamental prediction of revenue from alternative data. They want to know 'Is this good or bad?'" Baksht said.
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The super-competitive data world just added another challenger.

Ascential is a London-based media and apparel consultant, using its array of data-focused subsidiaries to help its clients understand everything from their brand's appeal among young people to what's selling in different geographies to the perfect price point for a pair of shoes.

But the company had added attracted a new kind of customer in recent years. More than a dozen hedge funds and private-equity managers reached out to the company to buy the same data it was already sending clients, according to Jeremy Baksht, Bloomberg's former global head of alternative data, who recently joined the Ascential to start a new unit: Ascential Alternative Data Division.

Tasked with selling to a new set of clients and creating new data products for these funds, the new division is a peek into a future where alternative-data companies could be skipped altogether in the data consumption process, with the original producer potentially bypassing firms like 1010data, Yodlee, and others, to sell directly to hedge funds.

Goldman Sachs is already scouring its own data to find insights to sell.

The Ascential team is far off from displacing any long-time data vendors, but the pressures on alternative data players have been mounting thanks to increasingly sophisticated clients and new, deep-pocketed competitors.

Ascential currently has five people in the new division, including Baksht, split between New York and London. The team in New York sits in the Times Square offices of WGSN, a division of Ascential that runs constant surveys on brands.

"We have all these products here at the company," Baksht said. "We just haven't had someone dedicated to selling to this audience, who has a Wall Street background."

The fact the firm was able to bring in several "blue-chip" financial services clients without a dedicated team is what attracted Baksht to the firm; he knows how hard the sell can be to the top hedge funds.

His goal is to deepen the relationships with financial services clients the firm already has while building out other products. For instance, he hopes to hire analysts to do more packaged datasets since the company had mostly been selling raw data.

"Most hedge funds and financial services firm are not trying to do a bottoms-up, fundamental prediction of revenue from alternative data. They want to know 'Is this good or bad?'" he said.

"That's exactly what we've been able to tell the firm's longtime clients for years."