MacKay Shields, a US-based investment firm owned by New York Life Investment Management and with over $70 billion in assets under management, has selected Markit EDM’s data management solution to manage the collection and distribution of data across its investment management systems. Markit won the deal in a competitive selection process and is working with both MacKay Shields and investment management consultancy Citisoft on the implementation of the EDM solution.
MacKay Shields uses Charles River software for front-office functions and Portia software for back-office accounting, and was using point-to-point solutions to join the systems together. It decided to slot in a vendor EDM solution as its set-up with point-to-point solutions was difficult to scale.
The investment firm will initially use the Markit EDM system as the basis of a pre-trade security master compliance engine that will replace a mainly manual compliance process. This is expected to be complete in the next few weeks and will be followed by a second phase of activity that will ultimately see the system managing all the firm’s data.
According to David Bates, principal at Citisoft, “Markit EDM provides a central hub for the management of complex data sets in an efficient and controlled manner in support of MacKay Shields’ world class investment capabilities.”
MacKay Shields adds to a roster of about 40 Markit EDM users in the US and a worldwide total of about 90 users, one of the latest being Markit’s first EDM customer in China. Daniel Simpson, managing director of Markit EDM, says: “We are seeing demand for data management on all fronts and we’ve seen data management initiatives become more prevalent in the front office in recent years, especially within buy-side firms. These organisations are focusing their efforts on front office data demands for actionable, reliable and up-to-date information to support pre-trade compliance and trading decisions.”
To support ever increasing data volumes and ensure Markit’s EDM system can scale to meet the needs of the largest tier one financial institutions, the company is working with Microsoft – the Markit EDM software sits in the Microsoft stack – to backtest 800 million records a day. Simpson says the company is also enhancing delivery of mobile data, designing web-based user interfaces, building business intelligence into the front-end of the system and investing in its software-as-a-service and cloud versions of the EDM solution.
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