Mizuho Securities USA has selected TAP Solutions’ TAPMaster platform to manage its entire database of historical market and reference data. The win is a coup for TAP, representing its first major win since it was accepted for Morgan Stanley wide-ranging Securities Master Service (SMS) reference data platform implementation (Reference Data Review, January 2005).
Institutional broker/dealer Mizuho Securities, part of the Japanese Mizuho Financial Group, plans to use TAPMaster in all its operational areas, including the equities, fixed-income and futures product lines. Mizuho is a major financial institution, formed in September 2000 by the combination of Dai-Ichi Kangyo Bank, Fuji Bank and Industrial Bank of Japan.
TAPMaster will be used to acquire, standardize and deploy market data and reference data to systems within these functional areas. Data sources to be managed by the platform include Bloomberg Data License, FT Interactive Data’s FTS and Reuters’ DataScope. TAPMaster will also integrate and manage Mizuho’s use of the Reuters Estimates & Fundamentals service, which was formerly part of the Multex offering.
According to Mizuho director and CTO Sandy Kapoor, the choice of TAPMaster followed a careful evaluation of market offerings. Mizuho concluded that TAPMaster provided the flexibility, time to market and pro-mise of return on investment the firm needed to meet its aggressive operational timelines. TAP expects the initial implementation to go live within the next few weeks. Full end-to-end inte-gration is scheduled within six months.
As part of the deal, Mizuho Securities will deploy a number of TAP’s add-on data management modules. Using TAPMaster’s Editor module appropriately permissioned Mizuho personnel will be able to contribute and modify the contents of the TAPMaster database with full audit trail. A workflow control facility ensures that only bona fide changes are submitted to the database, and those with authorization are able to investi-gate and rectify suspect data values.
The firm will also use TAPMaster’s Consolidator, a data acquisition and management platform that allows users to produce composite records from available data sources and make it available to applications in real time in the form of a composite database. As such, Consolidator handles data filtering, data population control, field attribution and interface consistency.
Finally, TAP’s new OnDemand API will allow Mizuho to deploy a wide range of securities reference data rapidly in support of new business lines or analytical requirements. TAPMaster On Demand is designed to reduce time to market for data-intensive applications.
TAPMaster On Demand is a web service that provides open, direct, real-time, read-only access to over 700 securities reference data fields held in the TAPMaster Global Capital Markets data model.
Additionally, the implementation will also feature connectors that will allow Mizuho to integrate TAPMaster directly to in-house applications and external ASP-based systems.
Since it won the Morgan Stanley deal, which put it on the reference data map in the New York marketplace, Canadian reference data platform provider has added a number of relatively smaller, niche players to its client list.
In 2004, TAP was selected by Abel/Noser, a New York-based securities firm, which used the platform to underpin its existing equities business and support a planned move into fixed-income securities (Reference Data Review, May 2004). More recently, Saudi multinational The Olayan Group implemented TAPMaster across its asset management operation (Reference Data Review, January 2005).
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