With the development of digital technologies such as big data, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence, a new round of scientific and technological revolution has begun. The digital transformation of the whole capital market has begun, and digital technology is penetrating the daily research business of the analyst industry. To further explore the Research Center for Securities Technology, THUIFR, conducted a "questionnaire-based survey of the digital transformation of the capital markets analyst industry”, with the aim of understanding the impact of digital transformation of capital market institutions and how digital technology was being applied in the analyst industry.
The research centre conducted the survey by contacting offices offline asking them to complete the questionnaire online, over a three-week period. A total of 152 questionnaires were collected, 99 of which were valid. Respondents were mainly analysts from the capital markets, and their organizations were mainly securities companies, public offering funds, private equity funds, insurance asset management and so son. Among there, there are nearly 30 securities companies, covering most of the seller's research departments in the current Chinese market.
From the survey results, the research coverage of both seller's and buyer's institutions is positively correlated with the scale of analysts employed. In the past, sell-side analysts worked in teams to earn commissions for research services, but this model has now reached a bottleneck. Most survey respondents believed that the current analyst industry was saturated, that it could not continue to expand significantly in the future, and that the traditional research business model was in urgent need of transformation. Most analysts had started to use digital platforms to diversify their research to increase their impact and reached wider audiences.
The application of digital technology in the investment research business could replace the manual collection, processing and analysis of data and information, and innovate and enrich the research methods. Digital technology can improve research efficiency and reducing research costs. It has also changed the how securities analysis is done, including replacing labor and impacting on the employment of some analysts.
