The Olayan Group, a Saudi multinational, has decided to implement TAP Solution’s TAPMaster platform as its core reference data management system for its asset management operation. The deal is the first for TAP for some time, following its big win at Morgan Stanley (Reference Data Review, January 2005).
At Olayan, TAPMaster will become the company’s corporate data hub. As such, it will provide the platform for deploying and managing a full range of reference data, including securities, issuers, counterparties, transaction and holdings. Olayan plans to use the new implementation, which is part of a major systems upgrade, to support new applications for portfolio accounting, order management and general ledger.
According to Ali Al-Ashqar, Olayan’s CTO, partly due to limitations on its IT resources, the company was seeking an off-the-shelf system to form the foundation of its new enterprisewide system architecture. Al-Ashqar says key requirements were ease of implementation of new business applications and the flexibility to integrate new asset classes, compliance requirements and data sources in the future.
Having made its decision to install TAPMaster, Olayan plans to begin implementation next month, with full integration with the new applications expected to be completed before the end of the year. TAP Solutions will work on the implementation with Olayan’s staff in New York, London and Athens. As part of the project, TAP Solutions will convert historical information held on a number of legacy systems over to the new platform.
Olayan operates a variety of businesses in a range of industries, including distribution, manufacturing and services. As a corporate, it is a major investor in both listed and private equities and fixed-income securities.
TAP Solutions came to prominence after winning the contract to provide Morgan Stanley’s retail brokerage – the former Dean Witter Reynolds – with a new enterprisewide securities master service. The Securities Master Service (SMS) was Morgan Stanley’s initiative to implement a centralized database to feed normalized data from multiple sources to a wide range of applications. These applications previously drew upon discrete security master files that had been designed to satisfy the specific requirements of the respective applications. This legacy situation made comprehensive and consistent updating of fields difficult. As a result, Morgan Stanley turned to TAP Solutions to provide its TAPMaster platform as a base data model for the SMS facility.
