November 20, 2025
Every decision, innovation, and advantage in today’s fast-moving investment landscape is underpinned by data – even the most cutting-edge AI tools are only as powerful as the data beneath them.
That’s why at BCI our Data & Analytics (D&A) team is a strategic partner: embedding expertise directly into the business, scaling AI capabilities, and empowering our world-class talent with data-backed insights.
Jennifer Hartfield, Senior Vice President, Corporate Data & Operations, shares how data and analytics at BCI goes beyond foundational infrastructure to create competitive advantage.
Q: As a global investor, how does BCI think about data and analytics?
JH: We see data and analytics as both a backbone and a strategic asset. BCI is one of Canada’s largest institutional investors, managing more than $300 billion in AUM on behalf of our clients – about 85% of that asset management is done in-house. The scale and complexity of what we do, from global operations to executing multi-billion-dollar deals, means we manage incredible volumes of data. Our ability to transform that data into something useful so we can act with agility and create value from within isn’t just a nice-to-have, it’s critical to delivering on our ambitions.
Our D&A team supports day-to-day decision making across BCI by delivering accessible, high-quality data and insights. That’s the foundational piece, but the real edge comes when data and analytics are leveraged as an enabler and strategic tool to find opportunities others might miss. When you get governance and infrastructure right, it positions you to do more with your data, and that’s when it becomes a competitive advantage. We’ve structured our D&A team to lean into and accelerate those value-add opportunities.
Q: You’ve embedded data expertise directly into the business. Why this approach, and how do you stay aligned while working across such diverse asset classes?
JH: When the D&A team was fully centralized, they were stretched across BCI – addressing needs on a reactive basis with few opportunities for project continuity and relationship building. Now, we operate in a “pod model” that combines deep business partnerships with the power of unified, enterprise-wide governance and oversight.
We’ve assigned dedicated data experts for each asset class – Private Equity, Infrastructure & Renewable Resources, and Capital Markets & Credit Investments – that work alongside the teams and can dive into their unique context, challenges, and goals. With the nuances and highly skilled nature of investing, this approach has been a game-changer in scaling our impact and working collaboratively to find the biggest wins. Importantly, while our experts are where the business needs them, we still have a central team that stitches everything together, facilitates knowledge sharing, and manages our central Enterprise Data Platform.
The pod model helps us build trust and deliver tailored solutions without falling into siloed thinking or missing opportunities that benefit the entire organization. It’s also allowed us to expand our impact, particularly on the value creation side. Recently, our D&A experts collaborated with the Private Equity team to help one of BCI’s portfolio companies build a scheduling optimization model, lowering labour costs and delivering direct business outcomes.
Q: BCI has been an early adopter of AI. How does the D&A team help the organization move beyond individual applications to create enterprise-level solutions?
JH: It’s exciting to see AI experimentation happening across BCI. Our Technology team is making AI tools widely accessible for people at every level to take advantage, and we’re already seeing numerous innovative use cases and incremental benefits.
The D&A team is focused on tackling strategic projects that will drive repeatable, organization-wide improvements – so we don’t only have one-off wins. We help to scale solutions by supporting reliable data, creating proper governance, and building trust in the outputs. This ensures that AI is a dependable partner as it becomes more formally integrated into our work.
A good example is the AI-powered model we developed for private equity that extracts key data from unstructured sources like PDFs, which has historically been a challenge. The broader investment team can now access high-quality, consistent, and filterable datasets at scale, eliminating the need for manual reviews and refocusing that time on high-value work like analysis and decision making.
Q: This space is evolving quickly. What’s next for the team, and how will you define success in the coming years?
JH: We expect automation and AI will continue to streamline basic foundational tasks so the D&A team can spend even more time delivering advanced capabilities and insights that drive business advantage. One of BCI’s strategic ambitions is to accelerate innovation across the organization and we see ourselves as a key enabler of this – unlocking possibilities and turning ideas into reality.
At a higher level, the best indicator of our success is continuing to enable a culture where using data and analytics is second nature for everyone. BCI has world-class talent, and we want to make it easy for people to combine their expert judgment with data-backed insights to deliver better investment outcomes for our clients and the people they serve. We’re driven by purpose and know that every deeper insight, sharper decision, and efficiency gain we enable ultimately benefits British Columbia and beyond. It’s truly investing that matters.
