The asset management arm of Scandinavian financial services group Nordea has implemented Markit’s enterprise data management (EDM) software to master its static data. Nordea selected the Markit solution, which was acquired with Cadis Software earlier this year, after an extensive search of potential solutions and a proof of concept. An incumbent vendor solution was not part of the competition, but remains in use for other data management tasks within the group.
The search for an EDM solution stemmed from a decision at Nordea to rationalise solutions that had built up over time and select a best-of-breed security master management solution. In the first instance, the Markit software is cleansing and validating both internal data and external market data feeds, and working within rules defining master copies set by the system’s users, to provide security masters to Nordea’s downstream accounting system. While not in the scope of the current project, the Markit solution allows multiple copies of a master to be created and delivered to a range of applications, such as risk and compliance. It can also be used as an enterprise platform for all types of data, although at Nordea it is limited to reference data.
Daniel Simpson, managing director and head of EDM at Markit, says that the addition of Nordea brings Markit’s customer tally in Scandinavia to half a dozen, up from zero 18 months ago. “This is a good client win for us and we have a strong pipeline in Scandinavia. We are also experiencing growth in Northern Europe and the US as a result of regulation and cost cutting. We will move into South America with a base in Sao Paulo, Brazil in the first quarter of 2013 and we are putting people on the ground in Tokyo and Frankfurt where Markit already has operations,” says Simpson.
He notes increasing interest among buy-side firms choosing to outsource back and middle-office services in using Markit EDM to reconcile data and facilitate data interchange between the firm and outsourcer, and also growing interest in the company’s cloud capacity. “We developed technology to support a cloud version of the EDM solution a few years ago and clients are now looking at the hosted solution. We have secured three hosted clients over the past six months and demand is strong on both the buy and sell sides. At the moment, firms are interested in hosting non-proprietary information, but in future we expect a slow migration towards hosting more data including position data,” says Simpson. Meantime, Markit will make its next enhancements to the EDM software in version 9, which is due for release in February 2013.
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