London and New York-based technology vendor Coexis has signed a global contract with Hong-Kong based investment bank CLSA Asia-Pacific Markets for the deployment of Coexis’ Syn~ for enterprise-wide reference data management and securities processing. Syn~ will be the primary processing system for CLSA Transaction Management at its Global Operations Centre in Singapore. Syn~ will then be further deployed in nine regional offices, in addition to London and New York.
CLSA has also subscribed to the Syn~Developer licence, an integrated development, testing, deployment and operational environment with an out-of-the-box library of industry standard models for global capital markets. These models can be extended without conventional coding, according to Coexis.
Coexis’ business development director Donal O’Brien says the relationship between Coexis and CLSA goes back some way. “We have known some of the operations and IT people at CLSA for a long time, both there and previously when they were at other firms, and as a result CLSA has been keeping a pretty close eye on our technology for a number of years,” he says. “While they had always been excited by what we were offering they hadn’t had an opportunity to apply the technology until recently, when a specific need arose around reference data.”
The requirement CLSA had was to implement an enterprise-wide reference data management capability in order to centralise and manage in one place a broad range of data types, including instrument, counterparty, SSIs and market data, O’Brien adds.
Following a vendor selection process, the broker picked Coexis Syn~ for two main reasons, he reckons. “First, though we offer a generic tool, we had also already invested a lot of time around reference data of various kinds including counterparty, instrument and SSIs, and we could demonstrate a working model with existing screens, rules and feeds. Second, because we also offer a generic, flexible modelling environment, CLSA was confident it would easily be able to extend the model to cover new instruments and new markets.”
This latter requirement ties into a trend Coexis has identified more generally in the Asian region, O’Brien continues. “There is no single utility processing model in place in Asia; there are a number of different models in place for back office settlement and for execution. There are also a number of different models for instrument data, corporate actions and pricing across the many different markets: there is no single source to tap into. Asia is also subject to a vast amount of change at the moment, with different markets changing their regulations and their definitions all the time. It is a region in flux, and definitions cannot be set in stone.”
In light of this, CLSA wanted both Coexis’ existing models for reference data, and the ability to change them instantaneously, he says. “Realistically, even while they are implementing changes will have to be made. So the firm wanted to be able to change the definitions of almost every aspect of the system at a moment’s notice.”
The project has only just started, and the implementation plan is being formulated. O’Brien says. “It will progress over a period of months and years, and we will be looking to achieve some quick wins.”
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