SIX Group is investing CHF100 million to rebuild and revitalise the IT infrastructure behind its Financial Information business, formerly Six Telekurs. The aim is to meet customer demand for improved reference and market data products and, in turn, renew the company’s reputation as an innovative market leader.
The CHF100 million ($110 million) investment will be made over the next four years, supporting an IT infrastructure programme that is about one year into implementation and is expected to take over four years to complete.
Antonio Camacho, senior programme manager at SIX Financial Information, explains: “The overall programme will replace our core systems for reference and market data, as well as some client facing systems. The programme is a big undertaking as we have been using the same systems for the past 10 to 15 years and we now want to simplify the IT landscape and meet increasing client and market needs.
“In the 1980s and 1990s, SIX Financial Information introduced innovative concepts to the business and became a market leader. To keep our leading position we want to increase our flexibility to provide the best possible service to our clients, offering them more customised solutions on the pricing side and helping them to handle increasing volumes of data.”
Much of the new infrastructure will replace legacy systems, many of which were built in-house. Before selecting vendors Camacho and his team carried out a detailed evaluation of many products. “We had a history of building everything in house,” he says. “But we decided to scan the market and look for vendor solutions and build around them, taking a phased approach to manage the build process. We will use vendor software as a base framework and focus our internal knowledge and skills on building differentiating functionality. There is no off-the-shelf vendor solution for a data provider company and our needs, like those of others, are very specific.”
Vendors selected to be part of the core architecture are Asset Control with AC Plus and OneMarketData with its OneTick database. SIX Financial Information has completed phase one implementation of AC Plus, which will be used as the core reference data processing platform.
It selected AC Plus for its scalable architecture and ability to service all necessary datasets at a high level of throughput. OneMarketData’s OneTick will be used as a firm-wide repository to store and run analytics on all global tick data and to support SIX Financial Information’s pricing systems. The new solutions will be run in parallel with legacy systems before cutover to avoid any disruption for customers.
“Our third party choices are the most adapted to our needs as a data vendor. We will start the go live process in the second half of this year,” says Camacho. “OneTick will help us store more price data, reduce costs and simplify our systems. AC Plus will allow us to be more flexible and introduce new business functionality for our reference data product. With data growth running at 30% to 50% a year, we are building a scalable and flexible infrastructure and massively improving the throughput and low latency of data while maintaining its breadth and depth.”
As SIX Financial Information settles into the SIX brand introduced last month and also including Swiss Exchange, Securities Services and Payment Services, Camacho says the 70 job cuts announced in January at Six Telekurs are not related to the IT rebuild, but rather to a move of some in-house manual data input to an outsourcing contract managed by Capgemini.
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