Martijn Groot has left Euroclear and rejoined Asset Control to lead the company’s product strategy. His initial responsibility is Data Service Manager, a product that is designed to help financial institutions improve the timeliness and quality of their market, reference and risk data services. It is also Asset Control’s first significant product release since it was acquired by Marlin Equity Partners in August 2013.
Groot left his role as director of product management for information services at Euroclear at the end of March 2015 and rejoined Asset Control in early April as vice president of product strategy. He originally joined Asset Control back in 2002 as a product manager, before becoming head of product management and later director of market strategy. Groot left Asset Control in 2012 and spent a year as a senior industry consultant in banking and financial services at iGATE Global Solutions before joining Euroclear and then completing the circle by returning to Asset Control.
Asset Control’s Data Service Manager product works with the company’s AC Plus enterprise data management platform to provide real-time visualisation and management of data supply chains and includes a read-only mobile version for remote supervision of operational activity. The aim of the product is to help firms track and monitor external vendor data and look at how it is processed internally and distributed to end users. Controls can be added where necessary to improve data management processes and performance can be monitored against SLAs. The software also graphs the historical performance of data processing over time, allowing potential bottlenecks to be identified and managed.
Groot explains: “Data Service Manager is a dynamic supply chain management and control tool that can help to optimise workflows, reduce the cost of providing quality data to end users and support regulatory compliance. It is an orchestrated layer on top of AC Plus that tracks data processing and monitors data consumption downstream. Business users can see whether required data services are on time, track what they need against what they get and measure performance against SLAs to see where work needs to be done.”
Steven Hargreaves, operating partner at Marlin Equity Partners, adds: “When we acquired Asset Control, AC Plus and the company’s other products were based on a static concept of data management. The focus was on feed handlers and cleansing and distributing data based on golden copies. The challenge we set was to start at the point of data consumption and work backwards to develop a process oriented view of external data driven by SLAs designed to deliver data to the right place at the right time and to the right quality standard.”
Data Service Manager uses thin client HTML5 technology, which will be used for all Asset Control user interfaces going forward, making its implementation a modest exercise. To date, one regional bank in the US has installed the software, with others expected to follow on a global scale.
