Capital markets technology provider Axoni has retooled and rebranded its data replication software to give clients greater flexibility in distributing their data to end users and lowering the cost of keeping databases updated.
The US-based company’s former AxCore product has been renamed HYDRA. The name is derived from the multi-headed creature of Greek mythology, which grows two new heads for every one that is cut off, and symbolises the ability of the platform to self-replicate from an original, or golden, source to various destinations in real time.
The improvements mean that identical copies of data can now be moved securely and instantaneously between different types of databases, on-prem systems and cloud platforms, and across firms and geographies.
“From one single installation at the source, you can make your data available to your clients in any way they want,” Axoni chief executive Greg Schvey told Data Management Insight.
Safe and Fast
Data professionals use replication techniques to distribute data because it is a fast and accurate way of ensuring that end users have identical copies of information held within centralised servers. It’s especially prevalent within the post-trade space where data often moves across organisations via SFTP and emails.
Schvey said that the technology behind HYDRA was updated to meet growing demands from the financial services industry, from which the company draws most of its business.
“The scale of data in the market has gone up by many, many multiples,” he said. “If you look at the finance industry, it is among the top industries in terms of growth of data that’s being always produced, the criticality of that data to operations, the way that it’s getting used and the places that it must get distributed to.”
“Replumb” Industry
Many organisations are running into trouble as they try to meet their new and growing data needs on “rails that are operating on 20-year-old technology”, he said.
“We decided that we needed to help replumb this industry with a pipe that is substantial and elegant and works properly for the large amounts of data that’s consumed these days.”
To highlight the data challenges facing capital markets companies, Axoni pointed to soon-to-be-released research from Coalition Greenwich that found more than 90 per cent of firms studied said that batch processes are difficult because of inefficiencies and operational risks in data sharing. A similar proportion said that data security was essential to them in their distribution processes.
Axoni’s software is already used by big-name clients including BlackRock, Goldman Sachs and the US Options Clearing Corporation and Schvey said “we’re constantly adding more ways for end users to consume” client data.
Identical Copies
Axoni’s retooled technology can replicate data “byte-for-byte” and by enabling databases to communicate with each other they can effectively let each other know when the source data has changed and then instigate the data update immediately, including all the necessary validations and checks.
“They’re constantly pinging each other saying ‘have I given you all the data that you’re supposed to have? Do I have all the data that I’m supposed to have?’,” Schvey said. “And they are constantly reconciling with each other so the source database knows that for every single data object in that database who it’s supposed to go to. Our software is automatically managing that distribution on a push basis.”
Schvey said that as well as reducing operational costs through automation, the speed at which the updated software can repopulate databases means that financial firms can maintain a real-time view of their trading positions instead of relying on end-of-day reports from exchanges.
Traders must make a “lot of interpretations and assumptions” between making their trades and the close of markets under the established system, he said.
“If you’re waiting for an end-of-day report, which most of the industry runs on today, you’re going to be stuck in a situation where you might miss a tradable event or you might mismark some risk,” Schvey said.
Having those databases populated automatically is “the goal everyone’s been trying to push for a very long time”, he added.
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