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

PolarLake Announce World’s First Semantic Web-based Reference Data Management Platform

Subscribe to our newsletter

PolarLake has announced the availability of the world’s first reference data management platform based on semantic web technologies.

The platform enables the acquisition, management and distribution of vendor and internally sourced reference data. Already being used by a number of tier 1 financial services firms, the platform enables, data loading 11x faster, queries 17x faster and on-boarding of new data feeds 20x faster than RDBMS based data management systems.

John Randles CEO PolarLake commented: “The PolarLake Data Management platform has been the result of multiple engagements with tier 1 financial services firms and builds on our leading capability in reference data distribution. This solution addresses the problem of scale and insight needed for the next generation reference data infrastructure. This is a truly disruptive approach to reference data management, based on post relational semantic web technologies. Data load time, query time, ability to onboard new feeds quickly, meet many and conflicting requirements of data consumers – these are the challenges large firms are facing with older systems designed for a different era. This platform is applying internet scale “big data” technologies to the reference data for the first time in this market.”

Mary Knox, Gartner research director commented: “Industry requirements for performance, scalability and availability have changed considerably over the past several years, due to factors such as: burgeoning volumes of reference data; the introduction of more-complex instruments and risk and compliance requirements; globalisation, resulting in firms being active in more markets with their own associated reference data sources to be managed; reference data management initiatives that centralise reference data within individual firms, resulting in single systems being required to handle more of the firm’s total volume of reference data, creating more-complex data governance processes to be maintained, and straining underlying data distribution and related capabilities.”

Liam Ó Móráin of the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI), a world leading research centre on semantics, commented “semantics will be the future way that information is described, shared and integrated. This approach and technology has huge potential to solve the complexity issue in data management in financial services. From our work in academia and interaction with leading users of this technology in industry we see PolarLake’s use of semantics as having the potential to be transformational in terms of how people think of, implement and manage data management and distribution in financial services.”

Subscribe to our newsletter

Related content

WEBINAR

Recorded Webinar: Navigating a Complex World: Best Data Practices in Sanctions Screening

As rising geopolitical uncertainty prompts an intensification in the complexity and volume of global economic and financial sanctions, banks and financial institutions are faced with a daunting set of new compliance challenges. The risk of inadvertently engaging with sanctioned securities has never been higher and the penalties for doing so are harsh. Traditional sanctions screening...

BLOG

Ataccama Gathers Data Capabilities into Focused EU AI Act Package

As the implementation date for the European Union’s AI Act looms, financial institutions are having to put their data estates on a secure footing to ensure they comply with the wide-ranging regulation. The Act requires organisations to have a broad and granular view of their data in order to show that they can trace any...

EVENT

ExchangeTech Summit London

A-Team Group, organisers of the TradingTech Summits, are pleased to announce the inaugural ExchangeTech Summit London on May 14th 2026. This dedicated forum brings together operators of exchanges, alternative execution venues and digital asset platforms with the ecosystem of vendors driving the future of matching engines, surveillance and market access.

GUIDE

Trading Regulations Handbook 2021

In these unprecedented times, a carefully crafted trading infrastructure is crucial for capital markets participants. Yet, the impact of trading regulations on infrastructure can be difficult to manage. The Trading Regulations Handbook 2021 can help. It provides all the essentials you need to know about regulations impacting trading operations, data and technology. A-Team Group’s Trading...