The Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board has launched EMMA Labs, its “innovation sandbox” that aims to enhance and accelerate the use of data analytics throughout the municipal securities market.
The platform builds off of data submitted through EMMA and with the roll out of the platform, launches two “Active Labs,”: a keyword search engine that sources information from hundreds of thousands of disclosure documents as well as a dashboard for market data analysis that helps to visualize market trends.
“With EMMA data now in the cloud, we will increasingly be able to leverage technology to create powerful analytical tools that empower data users to better identify, visualize and understand market trends,” said Brian Anthony, chief data officer at the MSRB. “The first Active Labs are an invitation to collaborate: any individual can create a free EMMA Labs account to provide feedback on prototypes and we welcome ideas for future Active Labs, tools and partnerships.”
EMMA Labs was created as a way for the MSRB to strengthen and enhance dialogue between the larger municipal securities market and the group hopes that the ability to search for specific terms such as ESG will provide much more value to municipal market stakeholders than the general document search available through EMMA.
“It’s a place that we can co-create with our stakeholders,” Anthony said. “What we hope from [our stakeholders] is for them to tell us how valuable those tools are.”
“Tell us what we’re doing right, tell us what we’re not doing right, and how we can be helpful going forward,” Anthony said.
The board hopes this dialogue with stakeholders will lead to further enhancements and offerings on the EMMA Labs platform, but may take some time to address what’s next.
“We hope that will spawn further developments,” Anthony said. “The way that we’re structuring this going forward, there will be an extended period of time for these offerings to work out.”
The launch of EMMA Labs is part of a $17.5 million systems modernization project the MSRB is undertaking.
“We are excited about EMMA Labs’ potential to drive collaboration with market participants and allows us to co-create the future of the municipal market transparency,” MSRB chair Patrick Brett said. “EMMA Labs is a key part of the MSRB’s strategic plan to leverage data to deepen market insights and facilitate regulatory modernization – and it opens up a technological pathway for engaging with stakeholders on opportunities for strengthening our market to serve the public interest.”