Data management specialist 1View Solutions is offering financial data managers a short cut to clean and consistent reference data that avoids the pursuit of a single golden copy. Instead it provides an outsourced service that matches internal data with reference data from vendors including Thomson Reuters, Interactive Data, SIX Telekurs and Exchange Data International (EDI).
The solution is called Ref-Data.com and is based on a 1View software platform that has been used by a large investment bank for about six years to consolidate data for credit risk management. The company also has some years’ experience of working on reference data for a data vendor, but quit that contract a couple of years ago.
Nigel Pickering, managing director and owner of 1View Solutions, which is based in Harpenden, Hertfordshire and has six employees, explains: “I have been involved in reference data for too many years and have watched the golden copy stories, but I have not seen one that has been successful. We are taking a different approach that will help organisations become consistent in terms of reference data.”
Rather than consolidating data across an organisation into a single system, a costly and resource hungry activity, 1View proposes a solution that allows data managers to upload files of internal data to Ref-Data.com. These are compared with reference data supplied by the data manager’s selected data vendors and are then downloaded with updates and corrections that can be viewed or handled automatically.
The task takes minutes, but could take hours for very large files, and files are returned in the same format as they arrived, making it relatively easy to update the data and slot it back into applications. The 1View software is can support many types of reference data, such as securities, prices, companies, corporate actions and more, and is based behind a secure browser, requiring users to have only an Internet connection and Ref-Data.com login. Alternatively, a large organisation can install the software, which runs on an Apache web server and uses a Microsoft SQL database.
“Ref-Data.com is based on many years of experience and uses proven 1View software. Its technology allows users to efficiently deliver global data consistency across federated data stores, something that was previously difficult and very expensive to achieve,” says Pickering.
The Ref-Data.com website went live last week and currently offers samples of reference data from financial data vendors. These will be augmented with complete reference data sets that are updated daily and uploaded when customers sign up for the service and select data vendors with which they want to match data. In terms of pricing, customers will pay a licence fee to the data vendor and payments to 1View for downloads.
Pickering says Ref-Data.com can be used to improve consistency and quality of core reference data across any size of financial organisation, be it local or global, without protracted lead times and the need for a major IT project. “This is a simple way to validate reference data and make updates,” he says, noting the potential of the software to match counterparties and, when the time comes, ease the burden of adding legal entity identifiers (LEIs) into systems.
Ref-Data.com has yet to attract a stream of customers, but its concept is endorsed by the breadth of reference data vendors willing to join the service. Jonathan Bloch, CEO of EDI, says: “Ref-Data.com makes it very simple for consumers to efficiently benefit form our extensive data range and proven quality.”
As the complexity of reference data increases, and particularly if LEIs are introduced as expected, Bloch expects the trend towards outsourced reference data management to escalate. As well as collaborating with 1View on Ref-Data.com, EDI is working with Netik and SmartStream, which also offer outsourced data services.
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