Hugh Daly, Broadridge Financial Solutions’ head of capital markets data and artificial intelligence, is being mischievous when he describes the company’s latest innovation, its Tradeverse data platform.
“It must sound very much like Tradeverse is a data lake – if it quacks like a data lake and walks like a data lake, fundamentally it must be a data lake,” he jokes.
He is right. Kind of: Tradeverse does indeed provide clients with a “front door”, as Daly describes it, to their vital information in a way that enables them to more efficiently perform their data tasks in a multitude of use cases.
What sets Tradeverse apart from other data lakes, however, is its use of the Broadridge Exchange (BRx) database, which pares data to its quintessential attributes to enable faster and more efficient utilisation.
Additionally, the BRx database has been built on the experience and performance of the company’s many other products. The BRx standard enables clients to access and use their data through Tradeverse from within any of Broadridge’s many applications. It simply hums away in the background, making life easier for clients in their trading, post-trade, regulatory reporting and other processes.
Common Sense
Having a single standard across data domains for use in all applications makes “common sense… when you think about how many of our products might need to talk to, say FIX or Swift or FpML, or any of these big industry data standards”, Daly tells Data Management Insight.
Tradeverse’s single ontology harmonises multi-asset class data from multiple vendors in real-time across front, middle and back offices. Broadridge said that building a trusted and transparent data source in such a way means clients can “manage costs, reconciliation and data quality and lineage challenges”.
Similarly, BRx lets users bring their regulatory data into Tradeverse’s unified environment so that compliance teams can better automate their reporting functions – a capability that’s of increasing importance as rules governing the financial industry multiply.
Broadridge has been able to ramp up its full-enterprise applications by the acquisition in 2021 of trading and connectivity provider Itiviti. This has given the company the expertise to offer front-to-back-office services into which Tradeverse has been slotted to provide a smoother integration of data activities.
This is of particular importance, says Daly, because front-office presentation is “an art in itself” and it helps trading clients make more efficient use of their “on-screen real estate” and accelerates their workflows, he says.
“You can capture activity from orders all the way through to executions, allocations and into settlement and because that all drops into the Tradeverse in a harmonised BRx representation we can render insights back to the front office, for example,” he adds. “We abstract the user from needing to know about the underlying applications.”
New Technology
Like many data products released onto the market in the past year, Tradeverse has been forged with artificial intelligence (AI) in mind. The “garbage in, garbage out” principle that applies to the data policies of any computational process is even more relevant to AI because it can work through much larger volumes of information.
Daly says Broadridge is acutely aware of this. The harmonisation of data via BRx means what goes into its AI applications can be trusted because it is unified and can be utilised across the spectrum of Broadridge products.
“We feel data is the big unlock for AI,” he explains. “You can talk to your data and you no longer need to know about the underlying platforms because it’s all been harmonised and simplified into the BRx model in that Tradeverse data lake.”
Underlining the importance of positioning its products to take advantage of the rush for AI, Broadridge’s latest Digital Transformation Study found that more than 95 per cent financial firms it surveyed said they are investing in the technology. The top use cases for AI were customer interactions as well as research and analysis among front-office operations, while the middle and back office are more focussed on data management and risk and fraud management.
Future Products
Consequently, Daly said the company is investing in a broad range of AI-enabled applications that will help clients make better use of their data. About 20 such additions are in development for front-office tools alone, he says. It’s also looking at ways to apply AI to automating research and other processes through agentic workflows.
“We think we’re really just starting,” he says. “We’ll be building a whole series of AI capabilities on top of that data to provide insights… that could be everything from trade surveillance, order optimisation and algo selection through to predictive fails – using AI to predict potential settlement fails so they can be remediated before they happen.
“We’ve got a lot of expertise and we have a lot of data,” Daly adds. “We think this is a great way to harness that genuine industry practitioner knowledge to and can bring it to bear to create solutions on across that data – there is lots of potential.
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