This month, EDM vendor signed a partnership agreement with SIA-SSB Group’s outsourcing subsidiary Kedrios to launch a new hosted data management service for the Italian market: Kedrios Data Management (KDM). Neill Vanlint, managing director of EMEA for GoldenSource, explains the details to Reference Data Review.
The two vendors have been in discussions for over a year, according to Vanlint, and spent some time during that period conducting mutual due diligence. “Both parties selected the other after exploring other vendors and partners,” he adds. “Kedrios are part of the SIA-SSB Group are probably the largest financial services support and utilities companies for banks and exchanges in Italy and one of the largest in Europe. Their size, prestige and client base enhances our virtual GoldenSource sales and delivery team.”
GoldenSource hopes to benefit from Kedrios’ expertise in delivering outsourced solutions to Italian financial institutions and its knowledge of the local market. The rationale is that Kedrios’ knowledge of the market will allow it to reduce time to market and facilitate the delivery of core data management capabilities without a need for extensive investment in IT and business resources. “As providers and distributors of data and a provider of back of office and risk management services they understand data management from 360 degree perspective,” continues Vanlint.
One of the major benefits of the partnership from the GoldenSource perspective is more traction in the local market, although it does already have a presence in the Italian and other Central European markets. The vendor also has one significant Italian client on its books: UniCredito.
The Italian market has a “few local idiosyncrasies in securities processing”, says Vanlint, as well as a number of local vendors in the data management space. However, the vendor is confident that this partnership will allow it to service the market effectively, peculiarities and all.
“Thanks to the alliance with GoldenSource we are able, for the first time in Italy, to provide financial institutions with a new service that can radically change their way of managing financial data and support them in their daily processes towards the final investor,” says Mario Danieli, general manager of Kedrios. “Today, industry operators need to have at their disposal efficient tools for the integration and processing of financial data flows which increasingly represent a strategic resource for all business processes, and a guarantee of transparency and customer protection.”
The KDM solution will be powered by GoldenSource’s EDM solution and aims to provide users with a centralised source of golden copy data for critical business processes, thus reducing potential risk and errors. The service will also have flexible user billing models, including pay by usage. This is likely a concession to the market conditions, which have left many firms strapped for cash. By providing a degree of flexibility in pricing, firms are more likely to be able to carry out more tactical implementations in the data management space rather than being forced to try and justify a more daunting multi-year project.
The vendors claim KDM will reduce risks and costs for users by creating a trusted set of data, which identifies and links information on products, customers and counterparties. By centralising and validating data, KDM will also reduce fragmentation and duplication of reference data used for downstream applications and improve the quality of information distributed throughout the enterprise, says Vanlint.
Through KDM, users will be capable of implementing customised rules and procedures for the collection, validation and comparison of data (securities and counterparts, corporate actions and prices) from different internal and external sources (information providers) used on a daily basis to support critical business processes. These capabilities will allow users to align their data management strategy with best practice recommendations from trade associations such as the EDM Council and maintain the product, market and customer classifications needed to meet MiFID standards, claim the vendors.
As for the competition, GoldenSource isn’t worried. “This is a unique proposition, nobody else is offering a full choice between a licence, application service provider (ASP), software as a service (SaaS) and ASP/SaaS+BP,” says Vanlint.
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