The London Stock Exchange (LSE) is certainly keen to add all the bells and whistles necessary to attract the maximum number of customers to its flagship post-trade platform UnaVista. Following the move of its transaction reporting service onto the platform earlier this month, the exchange operator has now added support for FIX and XML standards to UnaVista in order to allow customers to connect to the solutions available on the platform either directly or via its Fix Gateway service.
The recent deal with data integration solutions provider Volante extends their previous agreement, under which Volante provided support for Swift messages, to FIX and XML. UnaVista has therefore used Volante for the maintenance of Swift libraries for approximately two years for cash and stock reconciliation clients and this expansion now allows customers to use FIX and XML message standards throughout the LSE’s post-trade solution range.
Mark Husler, head of business development at LSE, explains: As part of our continuing efforts to make UnaVista’s services as accessible as possible, we will be linking UnaVista customers to our FIX gateway, as well as opening other transmissions channels based on FIX and XML. We chose the additional messaging formats from Volante to speed up implementation times, and reduce the overhead of managing different message types.”
The exchange operator contends that adding the FIX and XML libraries is part of UnaVista’s continuing efforts to help its customers to improve their levels of automation and make UnaVista’s services as accessible as possible. Husler believes a core benefit of UnaVista is its ability to bridge the gap between smaller manual firms and large automated ones, without the necessity to deploy any local software.
LSE first launched UnaVista back in 2007 as a global data integration, validation, matching and reconciliation service and has since been moving all of its post-trade offerings onto the platform, including the Sedol MasterFile data management solution in September 2008. According to the LSE, there are around 5,000 sell side and buy side users from around 2,000 global firms on the UnaVista platform, cutting across a range of multi-asset class solutions, encompassing Sedol Masterfile, reconciliations, transaction reporting, trade confirmations and data cleansing.
At the start of the year, the exchange operator hired ex-Xtrakter CEO Kevin Milne to head up its post-trade services business and these recent developments are likely all part of the LSE and Milne’s master plan for the back office space.
Subscribe to our newsletter
