The Securities Industry Automation Corp. (SIAC)’s Avner Gelb last month demonstrated tests of Volante Technology Inc.’s new Volante Metadata Repository (VMR) to manage and normalize disparate message types. Speaking at the High Performance on Wall Street conference in New York last month, Gelb, senior technical director at SIAC, said tests had enabled SIAC to shield internal databases of descriptive information from external messages, specifically FIX messages from the New York Stock Exchange, one of the exchanges for which SIAC acts as facilities manager.
Gelb, who is also a member of the Securities Industry Middleware Council (SIMC), has been advising Volante on its VMR development efforts. Volante launched VMR during the summer and sees an opportunity for using the system for helping clients manage corporate actions messages and other reference data types not requiring real-time messaging.
According to Krishna Sudarshan, CTO at Volante, VMR is a message management platform designed to aid in streamlining straight-through-processing (STP). By creating a repository for all business process metadata, VMR can be used as an enabler for managing reference data, including descriptive data.
Specifically, data types such as corporate actions, static data, Swift and FIX messages and market information can be captured by the system and stored in the repository. These business elements can then be reused by the enterprise, thus shielding internal databases and applications from the vagaries of the disparate message types that typically enter a financial institution during the trade life cycle. This in turn has the potential for reducing clients’ operating costs, by establishing a standardized, normalized schema for handling the various message types.
VMR consists of two components: a data dictionary and a message catalogue. The data dictionary consists of a list of enterprise element (or message field) definitions. These definitions can be derived from well-known dictionaries such as the ISO15022 data dictionary or from a company’s internally derived dictionary.
Users can use the VMR Data Dictionary to build enterprise internal messages, thereby standardizing messages used internally. This in turn ensures consistency and accuracy while avoiding duplicate or repetitive efforts like mapping and transformation routines within different applications.
Enterprise internal messages defined using the VMR data dictionary can be saved to the VMR catalogue of messages. By sharing the catalogue, enterprises can enable multiple users to use the same message like ‘Settlement Instructions’ with the same definition, rules and so on, over and over.
Volante was launched in November 2001 with a focus on data manage-ment. The company has focused on streamlining firms’ approaches to data management. By enabling users to focus on a message’s business content rather than on a format’s structural idiosyncrasies, chairman Vijay Oddiraji says, these efforts can yield time savings of upwards of 60% and cost savings of 50%.
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