Bloomberg is considering additional use cases for its Vault data management solution and File Analytics software including reference data management and maintenance for regulatory reporting.
File Analytics was added to Bloomberg’s cloud-based Vault service in June 2014 with a view to helping organisations locate and manage what Bloomberg calls dark data, essentially structured and unstructured data that is untapped and has not been analysed or processed. The company is already offering a trade reconstruction service based on Vault and the analytic software’s meta data-based data discovery capabilities and is considering a service that could manage and maintain the disparate types of reference data required for regulatory reporting.
Harald Collet, global head of Bloomberg Vault, explains: “There is a huge market need for reference data around regulatory reporting and firms must manage reference data in different formats in response to regulatory requirements. Over the next 12 to 18 months, we expect clients to focus on record keeping for regulatory reporting. Some large firms are building their own regulatory reporting data warehouses. Others may prefer to use a software-as-a-service solution such as Bloomberg Vault and File Analytics that provide simplicity, cost savings and potential use for other tasks such as trade reconstruction.”
Collet suggests a regulatory reporting solution based on Bloomberg Vault and File Analytics could, for example, provide answers to regulators’ questions about reports submitted in previous years. He says: “Looking forward two years, a firm may be asked questions by a regulator about a report it submitted. The firm needs to be able to prove what reference data it relied on when making the report. Bloomberg Vault can help with that.”
Large firms with their own regulatory reporting data warehouses and long tails of reference data may also benefit from the Bloomberg solution proposed by Collet and some are beginning to offload shards of their databases to be managed as part of the Bloomberg Vault service. Collet says: “Firms could archive the data and pull it back on a batch basis, but we could manage the archive for them and they would have one less problem to manage on their own.”
A similar sentiment lies behind Bloomberg’s trade reconstruction service, which uses File Analytics’ scanning and meta data approach to identify and collate necessary trading data. The company’s initial focus is on trade reconstruction under Dodd-Frank and MiFID II that requires structured trading data and unstructured communications data from different systems to be tied together.
Collet explains: “The difficulty is not in pulling trade data from a database, but in tying a counterparty to the trade and correlating communications such as email and texts with the trade. Our clients’ challenge is that their trade data archives and communications systems don’t talk to each other. Bloomberg Vault and File Analytics can bring together trade data and communications, and export accurate trade reconstructions as required by a regulator.”
Bloomberg has about 840 clients using Vault, about 100 more than the 750 it had when it introduced File Analytics last year, and adoption of both solutions is expected to continue at a good pace as firms struggling with lists of data management projects look for partners that can help them tackle the workload.
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