Federated Investors is implementing the Cadis enterprise data management (EDM) platform to increase operational efficiency, reduce risk and manage data across multiple acquisitions that have supported the $370 billion asset manager’s growth in recent years.
The selection of the Cadis EDM, a service oriented architecture (SOA) platform that allows data to be accessed wherever it is rather than moving it all into a central repository, followed a 10-day proof of concept at Federated Investors. This included software installation, sorting out data problems, training staff and proving the business value of the system and its ability to handle increasing data volumes and complexity going forward.
An initial implementation of the EDM at Federated Investors will cover securities master data along with holdings, accounts, indices and benchmarks. Typical implementation times are three to six months with Cadis encouraging customers to define specific business objectives and develop the data platform project by project.
Commenting on the asset manager’s choice of data management solution, Federated Investors’ vice president and principal business strategist Jim Wallace says: “As a company we are continually looking for ways to increase operational efficiency and reduce risk. During the proof of concept, we were impressed by the flexibility of the Cadis EDM platform in handling multiple data sets. By implementing this solution we will allow all departments within our organisation to become much more efficient when enhancing, moving or auditing data.”
Stuart Plane, managing director of Cadis, sees Federated Investors’ desire to improve data management and transparency replicated across many financial institutions. “Federated Investors was looking for a data management platform that could manage across multiple funds and manage growing volumes of data and increasing scrutiny of that data,” he says. “In general, one of the biggest challenges of data management is credibility as it has developed a poor reputation over the past 10 to 15 years with nine out of 10 projects failing to achieve their aim of improving data clarity.”
Plane notes that despite repeated failure, most competition for data management solutions still comes from internal IT departments, but he expects the tide to turn as companies are required to manage ever-larger volumes of data. “We have towards 60 reference sites worldwide, so it’s patently clear that the software works, but the need is to prove that it will still be working well to solve business problems in three to five years’ time,” he says.
Building on the EDM platform’s SOA base, which consumes data from various silos, validates and cleans it, and then publishes it to data consumers, Plane sees the need to continually develop the software to manage growing data volumes. Cadis is working on new ways to visualise big data and is also pushing out its software-as-a-service cloud model that was introduced last year and has found favour with three or four customers.
Plane expects cloud services to become more popular as the data management burden increases, but in the meantime he hopes to sign up two or three more clients for the enterprise version of the Cadis EDM over the next couple of weeks and take the customer base to over 60.
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