Wachovia Corp. is implementing a data management solution from Asset Control to handle price data for its risk management operations within its corporate investment banking arm. It is envisaged that the data management platform could be extended over time to other groups within Wachovia, including credit products and equity derivatives.
Barry Fenwick, divisional information officer of Wachovia Corporate Investment Bank, says, “Strategically we are moving towards a more centralized model. Asset Control will help us to achieve this.”
Wachovia, the fourth largest banking holding company in the U.S., has to date operated its own in-house data management solutions, which are fragmented across different business lines. The company decided it wanted to improve controls and the quality of data it used within its risk models.
Fenwick says, “The Asset Control technology being deployed on this project will improve our risk management and research capability. The new platform will allow us to leverage our comprehensive market history and provide additional analytical services to our clients.”
Asset Control was selected for proof of concept testing in September of last year, after an evaluation period during which Wachovia evaluated a variety of data management solutions. The chosen platform is now being rolled out across the risk management division through the first quarter of 2005.
The Wachovia system will be based on Asset Control’s “turnkey” AC Plus solution. AC Plus will integrate, cleanse, standardize and distribute data such as snapshot, end-of-day and time-series pricing information. This will cover interest rates, credit spreads, equities, foreign exchange, and commodities.
Wachovia will be leveraging several of Asset Control’s pre-built interfaces to data vendors. These vendors reportedly include Bloomberg, Reuters, and credit pricing company Markit, as well as internal data sources.
Like many managers, Fenwick says that for measuring the success of the implementation, Return on Investment calculations is not a useful measure. “Likely benefits are improved quality and controls, which ultimately will lead to lower costs.”
AC Plus is based on the AC Server for aggregation, cleansing and storage of data. As well as the off-the-shelf data interfaces, it provides pre-build mapping tables and cleaning rules and alignment of the data model to the ISO 15022 data dictionary. Extensions of the service include the AC Data Analyzer for extensibility of mapping and cleansing rules, the AC Desktop for system management and model extension and AC Web Client for remote access.
Ger Rosenkamp, chief executive officer of Asset Control, says, “Turnkey delivery of data management solutions enables our customers to … reduce implementation time and focus on their projects, instead of the software.”
Asset Control also offers an outsourced version of AC Plus in the form of ACDEX.
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