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

Project Brokers’ Cox Highlights Ref Data and Risk Management Applications of Biz Intelligence Software

Subscribe to our newsletter

In light of the current regulatory scrutiny of reference data, there has been a recent surge in the number of downstream data monitoring software solutions on the market and Project Brokers’ QlikView is a case in point. Daren Cox, CEO and managing director of the self-styled business intelligence consultancy, which was established back in 2005, speaks to Reference Data Review about various applications of the QlikView solution, including reference data quality tracking and credit and operational risk measurement.

Cox, who founded the consultancy firm back in 2005, after spending six years in Deutsche Bank’s IT department, indicates that his firm decided to become a reseller of the QlikView business intelligence solution in order to apply it intelligently to the financial services context. The idea behind the deal was therefore to use Project Brokers’ expertise in financial services IT to be able to find suitable applications for the business intelligence software. In terms of industry experience, Cox helped to create a software development and support organisation for Deutsche Bank’s Global Markets Sales Institutional Client Group (ICG) and worked on the firm’s reorganisation to outsource key elements of the larger Global Markets IT department to India and Russia during his time at the bank.

“We are able to understand the best applications for the QlikView solution in a financial services context due to our experience within these financial institutions and our consultancy expertise,” contends Cox. Project Brokers’ modus operandi is therefore to pick certain appropriate areas for QlikView to be applied in the operations and IT departments of investment banks and working with clients to implement the solution. This includes areas such as operational risk monitoring, credit risk, trade workflow monitoring and data quality management.

Cox notes that although 2008 was a tough year for growth due to the financial crisis, things have picked up over the last couple of years, allowing the firm to double in size in two consecutive years, to 55 people. He attributes this largely to the uptick in technology investment as a result of incoming regulation and a focus on risk management within the capital markets, and it is in these areas that the firm is targeting its solution and expertise.

Reference data quality is a key area in this endeavour and the firm has been working with one particular investment banking client – it has eight of the top 10 on its client list – to implement QlikView to monitor the firm’s legal entity data. A hot topic at the moment, given the recent consultation on the subject conducted around the US Office of Financial Research (OFR), many firms are attempting to improve the management of their client and counterparty data and Project Brokers is just one of the vendors aiming to capitalise on this development.

“Firms need to be able to identify a client across all their various systems, which contain many different identification standards, in order to be able to track counterparty risk and meet regulatory reporting requirements,” says Cox. “QlikView is able to gather this data together, map it and enable firms to analyse it in order to determine credit risk exposure.”

The firm worked on a bespoke project for a particular client to this end in late 2009 and early 2010, and Cox indicates that this experience and methodology could be applied to other similar projects in the future. The vendor is looking to build out a generic framework and process for such projects in the future, focused on the integration of client data across an organisation.

“One of the benefits of QlikView in a data quality context is that it is able to facilitate data analysis in a timely manner by highlighting duplicate data or inaccurately completed data fields,” elaborates Cox. This same logic can also be applied to data underlying risk calculations and Cox notes that credit and operational risk are two key areas for the vendor, where it is seeing considerable interest from clients.

In terms of credit risk, for example, the solution is able to handle what Cox calls the “billions of rows of data” needed to feed into credit risk calculations for a large financial institution. QlikView can then be used to provide a graphical layer for data analysis of this risk data, thus allowing a user to drill down to individual data items at the bottom.

Project Brokers is currently at a proof of concept stage with one of its large clients at the moment with regards to the application of the solution to between eight and nine billion rows of data, says Cox. However, the same theory has been used for much smaller risk data focused projects also.

“IT and data management teams are great at storing this data but they do not always provide business users with the tools to be able to understand and use this data, and this is where we come in,” says Cox. “Enabling users to drill down to the lowest level of detail.” He also suggests that business intelligence tools are more “democratic” in this way, by allowing all users, rather than just the exec team, to be able to access an operational dashboard for this data.

Cox indicates that in terms of growth, the plan for this year for Project Brokers is to expand beyond its current two bases in New York and London to Asia, likely in either Hong Kong or Singapore. The firm is also seeking to add the outstanding two global investment banks in the top 10 to its client roster in 2011, as well as picking up some tier two clients. Cox hopes that this will allow the vendor to double in size for a third consecutive year.

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

SmartStream Chief Jaffer Sees Rapid Change in Year at Helm

Just over a year into his tenure as chief executive of financial data automation provider SmartStream, Akber Jaffer finds himself surveying a data industry that’s changed enormously over his short time at the UK-based company. Chat GPT was a year old when he took on his new role and the artificial intelligence (AI) technology’s revolutionary...

EVENT

Data Management Summit London

Now in its 16th year, the Data Management Summit (DMS) in London brings together the European capital markets enterprise data management community, to explore how data strategy is evolving to drive business outcomes and speed to market in changing times.

GUIDE

AI in Capital Markets: Practical Insight for a Transforming Industry – Free Handbook

AI is no longer on the horizon – it’s embedded in the infrastructure of modern capital markets. But separating real impact from inflated promises requires a grounded, practical understanding. The AI in Capital Markets Handbook 2025 provides exactly that. Designed for data-driven professionals across the trade life-cycle, compliance, infrastructure, and strategy, this handbook goes beyond...