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

Interesting times ahead…

Subscribe to our newsletter

While I’m sure hard-core Reference Data Review readers would agree wholeheartedly with us that the world of enterprise data management is always an exciting place to be, it has to be said that recent weeks have been particularly exciting, with the flurry of corporate activity we’ve seen.

The investment by Fidelity Ventures in Asset Control and its concurrent acquisition of TAP Solutions is arguably both an endorsement of the value of data management systems (Fidelity took the prudent step of sizing the market prior to its investment) and a precursor of further consolidation in the supplier space, a sure indicator of increasing maturity.

Meanwhile, confirmation that Interactive Data Corporation plans to acquire the market data business of Xcitek with a view to creating a global corporate actions data offering reinforces the trend we’ve already seen for the data vendors to build out their coverage to position as enterprise providers. Indeed, part of the vision of new Asset Control CEO, ex-Reuters man Phil Lynch, is to work with the data vendors to support their enterprise ambitions by helping to make it easier for firms to consume their data and thus in theory stimulate wider use of it.

These highlights aside, the pages that follow are crammed with stories indicating the growing use by financial institutions of solutions and services to streamline data manage-ment for efficiency, risk management or regulatory compliance purposes. Reducing manual data handling, working with third parties to meet the data obligations of MiFID to free up resource to focus on its strategic implications and encouraging data vendors to partner to provide richer data sets through unified channels are themes running throughout this issue of Reference Data Review.

Activity generated by the growing investment in complex structured products in particular continues to gather pace. Increasing regulatory scrutiny is driving a requirement for more frequent and more accurate valuation activity by investment firms and administrators alike, and this creates a major data challenge when it comes to hard to price assets. The market requires its data vendors to step up to the plate and source useful additional data to bolster their own evaluation efforts, and they are doing so. As crow-barring product structures into legacy systems becomes an ever-less viable option from an operational efficiency and risk perspective, so this is stimulating demand for data management layers with data models able to cope with new instrument types. Fidelity’s conviction that the data management systems business has real legs is in part based on its belief that firms need to re-engineer their infrastructures to cope with the need for speed and efficiency for commoditised business on the one hand, and the growing complexity of new instrument types on the other. Since today’s complex new structure will inevitably become tomorrow’s slightly more commoditised instrument, to be replaced by a hitherto unthought of variant, it is hard to see how the demand for both data and systems with the coverage and flexibility to support complex products can do anything but escalate significantly over the coming months and years.

Subscribe to our newsletter

Related content

WEBINAR

Recorded Webinar: Detecting and preventing market abuse

Market abuse – unlawful disclosure of inside information, insider trading, circular trading, “pump and dump” schemes, etc. – poses significant threats to the integrity of capital markets. In 2024, global trading house Trafigura agreed to pay a $55 million fine to the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) for trading with non-public information, manipulating a...

BLOG

GLEIF Begins a New Decade in Growth Mode

The Global Legal Identifier Foundation (GLEIF) enters its second decade this month with its novel system of identifiers for everything from companies and their financial instruments to real assets fast becoming a global standard. While the next five years are expected to see yet more entities join the GLEIF’s open data project, the organisation’s immediate...

EVENT

Buy AND Build: The Future of Capital Markets Technology

Buy AND Build: The Future of Capital Markets Technology London examines the latest changes and innovations in trading technology and explores how technology is being deployed to create an edge in sell side and buy side capital markets financial institutions.

GUIDE

Directory of MiFID II Electronic Trading Venues 2018

The inaugural edition of A-Team Group’s Directory of MiFID II Electronic Trading Venues 2018 offers a guide to the European landscape resulting from new market structure introduced by the January 3, 2018 implementation of Markets in Financial Instruments Directive II (MiFID II). The directory provides detailed profiles of more than 70 venue operators and their...