About a-team Marketing Services
The knowledge platform for the financial technology industry
The knowledge platform for the financial technology industry

A-Team Insight Blogs

Data Management Summit: A Keynote on Data Utilities

Subscribe to our newsletter

Data management utilities could cut the cost of data, ease the burden of in-house data management and provide a solution that will deliver data not only to meet the requirements of today’s regulations, but also those of emerging regulations.

Presenting a keynote speech at this week’s A-Team Group Data Management Summit – which for the first time was linked to the company’s Intelligent Trading Technology Summit – in New York, Joseph Turso, vice president at SmartStream, argued the case for data utilities and detailed the Central Data Utility developed and run by SmartStream in conjunction with Euroclear.

Turso set the scene with a quick review of the past 20 years of data management and their sorry end of data stuck in siloed databases that are difficult to integrate and expensive to sustain. He said: “After the financial crisis, the mandate changed. Data management had to be improved and more ETL tools were used, but they didn’t get us where we needed to go. With $125 billion spent on data every year, the drivers behind a new approach to data management include timely trading decisions, best execution and compliance with regulatory requirements. The problem is that the wish list has to be achieved at reduced cost.”

Offering a solution to the problem, Turso suggested data utilities can come into play in data processing and data management operations. Users don’t lose control of their data as they continue to control vendor relationships and contracts; data from different vendors is not comingled but mapped to a common, consolidated data model; and efficiencies are provided by the utility fixing any data issues once for the benefit of all users.

Countering perceptions that utilities curtail the flexibility of data distribution, Turso touched again on user control and the ability to customise data distribution to different platforms, avoiding the complexity of doing this in-house and delivering significant cost savings.

Turning to the structure of the SmartStream Central Data Utility, Turso described a bottom layer that centrally manages data cleansing and mapping for all clients, a variable layer that can be used by clients on an individual basis to define the data integration and cross-referencing they want, and a top layer that can be customised by clients for data distribution.

He concluded: “The utility normalises, cleanses, maps and distributes data, providing clients with costs savings, improved time to market and, in turn, improved business performance.”

Subscribe to our newsletter

Related content

WEBINAR

Recorded Webinar: Streamlining trading and investment processes with data standards and identifiers

Financial institutions are integrating not only greater volumes of data for use across their organisation but also more varieties of data. As well, that data is being applied to more use cases than ever before, especially regulatory compliance and ESG integration. Due to this increased complexity of institutions’ data needs, however, information often arrives into...

BLOG

Data Quality Posing Obstacles to AI Adoption and Other Processes, say Reports

The rush to build artificial intelligence applications has hit a wall of poor quality data and data complexity that’s hindering them from taking advantage of the technology. Those barriers are also preventing firms from upgrading other parts of their tech stacks. A slew of surveys and comments by researchers and vendors paint a picture of...

EVENT

TradingTech Briefing New York

Our TradingTech Briefing in New York is aimed at senior-level decision makers in trading technology, electronic execution, trading architecture and offers a day packed with insight from practitioners and from innovative suppliers happy to share their experiences in dealing with the enterprise challenges facing our marketplace.

GUIDE

AI in Capital Markets: Practical Insight for a Transforming Industry – Free Handbook

AI is no longer on the horizon – it’s embedded in the infrastructure of modern capital markets. But separating real impact from inflated promises requires a grounded, practical understanding. The AI in Capital Markets Handbook 2025 provides exactly that. Designed for data-driven professionals across the trade life-cycle, compliance, infrastructure, and strategy, this handbook goes beyond...