Avox has set out its development plans for 2016, including the introduction of a sanctions screening service, support for MiFID II compliance and enhancements to its managed and Know Your Customer (KYC) services. The company, a specialist in entity data services, will also work with its parent DTCC and other subsidiaries, such as Clarient and its KYC utility, to integrate data services and offer customers automated solutions designed to improve efficiency.
Avox plans to introduce a sanctions screening service in the first half of 2016 and ahead of this is working on how to represent and communicate sanctions data to its customers. Users of the service will provide Avox with an ‘entities of interest’ list, and the company will monitor the entities and alert users to any changes in the entity data.
Mark Davies, managing director at Avox, explains: “A sanctions service is a logical extension of what we do. We segment entity data by geography, ownership structure and corporate sector, which means we are well placed to monitor data against sanctions lists that are in the public domain.”
The company’s MiFID II compliance solution is being developed as part of its Enhanced Data Service (EDS), which is dedicated to regulatory reporting. The service already maintains 60 fields of core data for compliance with regulations including Dodd-Frank, EMIR, Fatca and FCA Transaction Reporting, and the company plans to interpret the text of MiFID II and work with customers to ensure consensus on interpretation early next year before developing a compliance solution. Davies comments: “MiFID is complex and includes additional classifications and identifiers. It moves on from derivatives reporting to require data for reporting across all asset classes. It will also be a game changer for the Legal Entity Identifier (LEI) as all issuers of instruments will need an LEI. The hard work is in studying the text and identifying data components, the solution build within EDS is then fairly straight forward.”
The company’s managed data and KYC services are also being enhanced, in part as a result of Avox acquiring data, technical know-how and intellectual property from CounterpartyLink (CPL) after its collapse earlier this year. Avox has also recruited former CPL managing director James Redfern in a sales and customer relationship role, former CPL chief operating officer Carl Needham in a product development role, and has been approached by some former CPL customers that have now migrated to Avox entity data services.
Davies describes the market niche that CPL specialised in as Public KYC, essentially the low to medium risk level of KYC, where the majority of required entity data is sourced from information in the public domain – at the top and most complex risk level of KYC are entities in jurisdictions that don’t list entities or where it is difficult to source data. Public KYC plays well into Avox’s KYC service, which provides documentary back-up to support data provided by the company’s managed data service, as well as additional information such as director details and entity ownership down to 10%.
As well as providing new and enhanced entity data services, Avox is responding to customer demand for single contracts and single data pipes, with customers then distributing data in house. It is also working to make it easier for customers to integrate its data. Early this year, it introduced application programming interfaces that allow Avox content to be pumped directly into in-house applications or enterprise data management solutions, and it plans to develop more of these types of approaches next year. More broadly, it is working with DTCC to tie together some of the company’s data solutions and deliver automated services designed to help clients improve efficiency. An early example is a link between Avox entity data and Omgeo accounting data that could be used to support KYC processes.
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