Aim Software has responded to a request from Clearstream International for increased pricing performance and timely price delivery with an upgrade to its Gain data management platform. The upgrade can support daily pricing of over 700,000 records based on 2 million raw prices in less than 20 minutes.
Clearstream International, the international central securities depository (ICSD) and part of the German Stock Exchange Group, experienced 20% growth in its portfolio last year, and was struggling to meet its schedule for pricing delivery to both internal and external customers. Realising the need to increase pricing performance and the timing of pricing availability, the company, which has used Gain as a pricing hub since 2009, returned to Aim with a request to rework the solution to meet its needs.
As well as improving the timelines and quality of prices, Clearstream wanted to add 200,000 German financial instruments to Gain and have the capacity and performance to onboard more instruments for centralised pricing. Milan Rippel, department manager of ICSD core product design at Deutsche Boerse Services, says: “We have also extended the rating and pricing normalisation in order to perform cleansing and scrubbing for additional data fields. For example, further rating information from S&P, Fitch and Moody’s is now processed by Gain.”
Responding to Clearstream’s request, Aim changed the data model and processing within the Gain platform and added indices to deliver performance in line with Clearstream’s requirements. Interfaces to the platform remained the same, so there was no disruption during the upgrade, and the enhanced solution went live in late June to the satisfaction of data consumers and operational users. The upgrade is expected to support Clearstream for about three or four years, depending on business growth, and could then be reviewed.
Josef Sommeregger, global head of business development and sales at Aim, comments: “This upgrade illustrates the high performance of Gain for the centralised pricing activities of Clearstream International. With the need for more operational efficiency, improved responsiveness and consistent quality across all business lines, a targeted business application like Gain delivers demonstrable business outcomes.”
