With an increasing industry focus on data governance, one vendor has been taking a different approach to managing data quality from a business point-of-view by providing exceptions workflow, a range of data enquiry tools, and ‘what-if’ scenarios for data sourcing, all of which sit on top of a financial institutions’ existing data architecture.
Sun Street – which was co-founded by Cadis’ (now Markit EDM) first product and consultancy managers – has built up clients including Henderson Global Investors and Investec Asset Management, for its Curium Data Quality Management (DQM) product. It has now released a major new version of Curium to add a new module extending the product into Master Data Management (MDM).
This addition to Version 4 is based on the same meta data modeling functions used in Curium DQM and enables clients to match and de-duplicate records from multiple data sources (even with variable quality in identifiers) using mastering tools to construct master records from these various sources. It includes the ability to capture data provenance for every attribute so the user can see where the data originally came from without going back to individual applications to try and trace the source.
Clever Workflow & What-if Scenarios for Data
Andrew Sexton, Sun Street’s sales and marketing director, believes Curium’s USPs are centered on its “clever workflow which enables data operations teams to take ownership of the data and manage it from the ground up. They can investigate data across their architecture, they can test what-if scenarios to evaluate the impact of different data sourcing with its sophisticated data modelling, and the workflow helps drive progress on data quality by applying visibility and criticality to the data issues.
“If you don’t have visibility or control over your data issues, then you cannot have effective data governance,” says Andrew, who was previously the Managing Director of SS&C Europe.
The visibility provided by Curium’s dashboards “enables you to push back to the business and evaluate whether the best sources are being used for certain data points, whether it is the most cost-effective approach, and whether the client is achieving the right level of data quality,” he says.
A big benefit of the Curium approach, says Andrew, is that it has been designed to complement the firm’s existing data architecture and investment so as to minimize the cost of implementation and upheaval. He says the appetite amongst financial institutions for major technology implementations is low and the complementary approach is gaining momentum.
While Sun Street has had success with its DQM product, it felt the need to extend further into data operations with its new MDM module. “While DQM gave our clients control over data issues, we found that many still have critical problems with data matching and data duplication before they could get to data governance.” With Curium Version 4, says Adam Saunders, product director at Sun Street, “Clients can really get to grips with their data construction challenges such as trialling multiple construction methods alongside each other to see where costs and coverage can be improved through different mastering approaches or switching data suppliers.”
Data that Curium currently supports includes security reference data, market data, corporate actions, portfolio and fund data, holdings and transactions, periodic data such as client reports, client static data and more.
The company has established itself with buy-side clients but Curium can also be used by sell-side firms. Based in the UK, Sun Street is now seeing interest in areas like Holland, and has plans to expand into the US.
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