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

DClear Reference Data Services Gain Significant Momentum a Year on From their Launch

Subscribe to our newsletter

SmartStream, the financial Transaction Lifecycle Management specialist, today announced significant progress for its DClear business, a year after its launch. With reference data on the agenda again at this year’s Sibos conference, a utility service model providing clean, consistent reference data as a service has come to the fore as the industry wrestles with data quality and its impact on risk management.

Philippe Chambadal, CEO of SmartStream, said: “We believe that by looking to address the issue of reference data in the market and its impact on the transaction lifecycle as a whole and not on an institution by institution basis will have a lasting impact and deliver significant benefits to market participants.”

A year on from its launch the DClear services, including securities cross referencing and a data dictionary have gained considerable traction in the markets. It has delivered significant project milestones including mapping more than 3.5 million security identifiers, equating to just over half of all the know identifiers and approximately 350 Exchanges. As a result of this development work, DClear now delivers a Central Data Hub hosting a shared common source of reference data available to banks, custodians, broker/dealers, money managers.

One client, a leading US-based Asset Manager, is using the DClear service to manage securities cross referencing, lowering its trade breaks and strengthening its risk controls. A spokesperson for the firm said: “Prior to DClear a major trading group in the UK were primarily maintaining the matching manually between the web sites, Reuters, and Bloomberg. This approach caused delay and limitation on the volumes, loosing precious times in trading. With DClear, we eliminate all the internal jobs and automate all of the matching; allowing the traders focus on their core competency of trading.”

“In the US, DClear has enabled us to perform order routing automation internally. Previously the information was sent to the Prime Broker to execute the trade. We would need to staff up a group of dedicated experts on a 24×6 bases to map the disparate data coming in via multiple sources to a centralised location. By outsourcing this to DClear we are able to reduce our resource cost while still getting the product we need.”

David Penney, EVP Strategy and Product Development at SmartStream, commented: “Reference data accounts for almost half of trade failures, resulting in billions of dollars lost in opportunity. Reference data is costly to acquire and maintain, duplicative across the industry and of no strategic value. DClear Utilities removes that significant cost overhead and provides firms with superior quality reference data as the basis for their daily operations.”

Subscribe to our newsletter

Related content

WEBINAR

Recorded Webinar: Hearing from the Experts: AI Governance Best Practices

The rapid spread of artificial intelligence in the financial industry presents data teams with novel challenges. AI’s ability to harvest and utilize vast amounts of data has raised concerns about the privacy and security of sensitive proprietary data and the ethical and legal use of external information. Robust data governance frameworks provide the guardrails needed...

BLOG

Data Transparency ‘Crisis’ Hampering Private Markets: Report

Private markets investors are dogged by a “data transparency crisis” that is exposing them to greater risk of compromising their fiduciary integrity and losing their competitive edge, according to a new report. In what the authors call a private markets paradox, the report by Rimes states that investors are beset by a lack of data...

EVENT

RegTech Summit New York

Now in its 9th year, the RegTech Summit in New York will bring together the RegTech ecosystem to explore how the North American capital markets financial industry can leverage technology to drive innovation, cut costs and support regulatory change.

GUIDE

The DORA Implementation Playbook: A Practitioner’s Guide to Demonstrating Resilience Beyond the Deadline

The Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) has fundamentally reshaped the European Union’s financial regulatory landscape, with its full application beginning on January 17, 2025. This regulation goes beyond traditional risk management, explicitly acknowledging that digital incidents can threaten the stability of the entire financial system. As the deadline has passed, the focus is now shifting...