Tech Mahindra, a business process outsourcing specialist and parent of London-based investment management technology consultancy Citisoft, has repositioned a reference data platform acquired from UBS Global Asset Management to offer an offshore reference data utility aimed at meeting market demand for lower cost, high quality data that can reduce risk and increase efficiency.
The global data utility has been introduced under the Tech Mahindra Managed Data Services brand and offers securities reference data across all asset types, reference data for corporate actions, tax information and end-of-day and intra-day validated pricing data. The utility handles data cleansing and validation, with clients buying licences to access the data.
Tech Mahindra suggests the utility differs from other offerings in the enterprise data management market as it is owned by the company and can be developed. It is also agnostic on data feeds, including 20 from vendors including SIX, Markit, Bloomberg, Thomson Reuters and DTCC.
The company’s first customer is UBS Fund Services in Luxembourg. Under the terms of a five-year services contract with UBS, Tech Mahindra will create and store golden copy data and provide multiple intra-day golden copies to the asset manager. As part of the acquisition and customer deal, Tech Mahindra, which is headquartered in Hyderabad, India, will take on some staff from UBS Global Asset Management who were working on the platform in Luxembourg, but most staff will be located in India.
As a repositioned platform, Tech Mahindra MDS already covers all time zones, markets and asset types, updates 2.5 million issuers on a daily base, receives 200,000 customer price requests and validates 75,000 prices. Some 20,000 corporate actions are checked every day, along with 1,800 tax figures. Looking forward, Tech Mahindra plans to extend these metrics and add reference data around indices and benchmarks, legal entity identifiers and clients.
While Tech Mahindra will lead sales of the service to the banking, financial services and insurance sectors, Citisoft will be able to provide consultancy as necessary. Steve Young, CEO of Citisoft, says Tech Mahindra MDS has been designed to improve data quality and drive down the total cost of data ownership, in turn reducing risk and increasing efficiency. To manage clients’ cost issues, the company has built a toolkit into the data management system that allows users to analyse the cost of owning data, including people, processes and technology. Data quality will be underpinned by service level agreements and key performance indicators will be added as more clients sign up for services and data volumes grow.
Reflecting on the data challenges faced by financial firms, Citisoft Group CEO Jonathan Clark, concludes: “Outsourcing models have evolved over time and attitudes are changing as firms acknowledge that there is a big difference between outsourcing and offshoring, and that captive outsourcing is not an efficient approach. The need is for a commercial relationship with a centralised data utility that can deliver high-quality, accurate data and a lower total cost of ownership.”
Subscribe to our newsletter
