Luxembourg-based international central securities depositary (ICSD) Clearstream International has completed the rollout of Aim Software’s Gain platform as its new central pricing data management hub. The implementation has been going on for the last seven months and the platform is now able to support the daily pricing of more than one million securities, says Josef Sommeregger, vice president of business development and sales at Aim Software.
“The business logic created in this project allows Clearstream to create its own rules, mappings and workflows in a graphical GUI,” continues Sommeregger. ”The transparent and easy definition of the business logic will allow the customer to become independent in the extension and maintenance of the logic in accordance with future needs.”
The ICSD, which is part of the Deutsche Börse Group, decided to implement the solution in order to better cope with the current market volatility by increasing its pricing data coverage, timeliness and quality checking, says Jean-Marie Piquard, director and head of custody and reference data products at Clearstream. “We were looking for a proven pricing master with comprehensive business logic and a connectivity to a wide range of data sources,” he explains.
Aim’s solution was selected following a comparative analysis of all the pricing data management solutions on the market, according to Piquard. Clearstream chose Gain for its broad connectivity to a range of data feeds, its rules-based framework and its quick implementation time. The solution has now been fully integrated into the ICSD’s core systems and it is hopeful that its future needs will be met. Piquard says he expects that Gain will be able to provide Clearstream with the necessary flexibility to be able to cope with future challenges, as the market focus on pricing transparency increases and volumes continue to grow.
The platform went live in mid-October, after a seven month rollout, which was expedited due to Gain’s standard sets of mappings, workflows, rules and predefined processes, says Sommeregger. Martin Buchberger, head of marketing and sales at Aim Software, adds: “With Gain, we have always been aiming at providing a constantly growing data management platform whose evolution benefits the entire client community. Thus, Clearstream profits from the experience retrieved from more than 108 implementations, which all helped to reduce the overall data management efforts for our clients.”
The ICSD has not been afraid of investing in its data management capabilities over the last few years. In 2006, Clearstream bolstered its corporate actions data management capabilities with the rollout of the TCS B?NCS Announcement Capture solution. The rollout of the work?ow-based corporate actions announcement scrubbing solution was aimed at providing higher levels of efficiency and accuracy in its corporate actions data. According to Piquard, the rollout resulted in a reduction in manual errors, increased confidence in data quality and improved time to market.
The Clearstream win for Aim Software also represents another success for its recently opened regional subsidiary in Luxembourg. The data management solution vendor has been scaling up its efforts in certain key markets, including Switzerland, France and Benelux, over the last few months.
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