The announcement of record 2010 results this week by EDM vendor GoldenSource could come as a surprise to some, given the bashing that the concept of ‘golden copy’ has taken in the industry of late and the numerous (thinly veiled) references to the troubles being experienced by the more established EDM vendors in the market by new entrants to the space. The vendor has also faced the high profile exits of execs including Hugh Stewart (to rival SmartStream) and long-time marketing head Gert Raeves (who is currently on gardening leave) over the last few months. Nonetheless, CEO Mike Meriton indicates that 2010 was a “landmark year” for GoldenSource.
In fact, the vendor claims it achieved more than 30% growth in year over year revenues for 2010 (although hard figures have not been provided), which it attributes to the addition of several new clients and traction in less traditional sectors for GoldenSource such as insurance. Meriton also reckons the vendor’s investment in R&D has paid off, particularly as a result of its focus on regulatory and risk management developments.
“This year our resolution is to help our clients plan and meet upcoming regulatory changes by improving data transparency and auditability. We will also continue to address and enable best risk management practices, which in our view include advanced data aggregation capabilities,” he says.
This is obviously a reference to the launch of its new RiskHub suite of solutions towards the end of last year. Much like its rivals, GoldenSource has focused on the link between risk management and data management in terms of ensuring data quality for the data sets underlying risk calculations and regulatory reporting. After all, there has been a lot of discussion in the market about the vital need to get risk data right in the face of both regulatory and business pressures and, as a result, the risk and compliance functions have got much more involved in the data management endeavour.
GoldenSource has also ventured into the market data space with its partnership with analytics and data management specialist Xenomorph, which was announced back in March last year. This partnership resulted in the development of the new GoldenSource Market Data Solution (GSMDS), a single platform for market and reference data management that aims to give risk officers what GoldenSource describes as “a 360 degree view of all risk related data”. To this end, the platform purports to unify trading reference data, such as static data, corporate actions and end of day pricing, with more time critical market data, such as intraday pricing, rates, curves and derived data sets including volatility surfaces and correlation matrices.
In terms of partnerships, GoldenSource has been a busy little bee over the last few years and in November signed another deal with visual data analysis solution vendor Panopticon to provide a more user friendly reporting and data visualisation layer for its data management systems. This focus on making solutions’ front ends more touchy, feely and intuitive has been a serious trend within the vendor community this year, and many such partnerships have sprung up – see Panopticon’s partnership with risk management solution vendor SAS for another example.
Turning back to GoldenSource though, this refocusing is understandable, given the perception by many in the market of the ‘old way’ of EDM projects as multi-year, monolithic beasts that have the potential to run over budget and time. By demonstrating its capabilities in specific risk and regulatory projects, of a more management size (much like its rivals), GoldenSource has been able to bag clients at a time when investment has been restricted by tough economic conditions.
Asia Pac has also been a bright spot for many vendors over the last couple of years, and GoldenSource is no exception to this rule. Vanlint explains: “We were able to accelerate our growth in Asia Pacific by signing on clients, including leading financial institutions in China, Australia and Singapore. Going forward, we will continue our expansion into this region and help leading institutions in their pursuit in developing best in class data management strategies as they enter the global stage.” Given the interest of many vendors in the region, one can expect tough battles to be fought over market share in the coming months and years.
The vendor’s ambitions in the risk space have also, no doubt, been bolstered by the addition of new faces to the exec team including ex-Charles River Development product management director Steve Engdahl. Since his appointment, Engdahl has been promoting the RiskHub solution and its relevance with regards to regulatory developments such as Basel III in the securities and banking world and Solvency II for insurers. He has also talked to Reference Data Review about legal entity data standardisation and its potential positive impact on the EDM space going forward.
It will be interesting to see whether the vendor is able to grow its revenues at a similar pace this year and it would be very interesting indeed to see the exact figures for 2010 (without having to trek to Companies House). If I can track them down, you’ll be the first to know.
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