As its deal with E*Trade increases its tally of U.S. customers, Netherlands-based data management platform vendor Asset Control is setting its sights on the Asia-Pacific region, as well as planning to leverage its data management platform to create vertical solutions.
Asset Control has announced two sales this month. The E*Trade Securities subsidiary of E*Trade Financial Corporation is deploying AC Plus for the management of securities reference data. Meanwhile, in a more far-reaching deal, Paris-based Calyon Corporate and Investment Bank, part of the Credit Agricole Group, has chosen the solution as its centralized data management platform for reference data, corporate actions and pricing data across its financial and commodities businesses globally. A phased implementation, being carried out by Asset Control partner Accenture, is under way.
Asset Control CEO Ger Rosenkamp counts the Calyon win as a “big achievement” because it is “all-encompassing”. “Calyon has 13,000 employees, most of whom will be exposed to data coming out of AC Plus,” he says. “The types of data covered include price – end-of-day and snapshots, and potentially also real-time, instrument reference data and corporate actions data, for the firm’s equity department – front, middle and back office – and also its energy activities.”
E*Trade is taking the standard delivery of Asset Control’s centralized reference data management solution. While not an enterprise-wide deal, the E*Trade win is important, Rosenkamp says, because E*Trade is a major U.S. player. “Initially, we were a typical European company. We started our activities in the U.S. in 1999, and now the number of customers we have in the U.S. is growing significantly towards the same number we have in Europe.”
Geographically, the next frontier for Asset Control is Asia-Pacific. The vendor already has one customer in Singapore, and it attended Sibos in Sydney earlier this month with the aim of leveraging that position. “AC Plus is also ready to enter the vertical markets,” Rosenkamp says. “A solution typically has several layers – a data management layer, business rules to process the data and a GUI to present the outcomes. Applications all have the data management layer in common. There is every reason to deploy a centralized data management platform and leverage it in all sorts of applications.” The shelf-life of applications in the fast-changing financial markets is getting shorter, he argues, and this is easier and cheaper to deal with if all applications connect to a common data layer – effectively a service oriented architecture (SOA) for data. The extension of its partner programme AC Alliance is central to Asset Control’s realisation of this vision. Existing partners include German company BNext, with which Asset Control is working to provide a solution for MiFID, and corporate actions system vendor Xcitek. Says Rosenkamp: “We will also be creating verticals with other third parties, and potentially we could develop applications ourselves.”
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