Providers of counterparty and client data management solutions in Europe face new competition from California based Siperian, which in partnership with Deutsche Boerse-owned counterparty data specialist Avox has secured a soon-to-be-announced deal with what it describes as a major European bank. On the back of this, Siperian is beefing up its presence in Europe, opening a London office and hiring additional London-based staff. It has also forged a partnership with Hewlett-Packard to help it achieve scale and to bolster its deployment and support infrastructure in the region.
Siperian’s first target market for its solution, the Siperian Hub, was the life sciences industry. According to Siperian founder and CTO Ken Hoang, it now counts as customers most of the world’s large pharmaceutical companies. Siperian began targeting financial services firms around a year ago, both on the institutional side for counterparty management and on the wealth management side for CRM.
“I started the company in 2000 because I realised that firms in all industries were struggling with the problem of customer data,” Hoang says. “Common data was being captured by numerous different applications, and needed to be brought together; I set out to solve the problem of consolidating it to get a unified view of data. The idea was to create an infrastructure, because an application was not the right fit. The problem needed to be universally solved, and we set out to solve it on a horizontal basis, and to enable different data models to be plugged in to make the solution more business-centric.”
Siperian Hub is designed to support an iterative roll-out, according to the vendor, to enable clients to phase implementation and get a quick return on investment before turning on the next capability. The base product within Siperian Hub is Siperian Master Reference Manager.
This is focused on dealing with customer data but can also manage other types of customercentric master data as well. The Siperian Hierarchy Manager component enables institutional and private banks to understand the relationships between different entities. “This is where our partnership with Avox comes in. Clients can bring in the Avox data and their own structures, in order to roll up their risk exposures, and understand their risk per client and geographic region,” Hoang says.
The Siperian Activity Manager component offers the ability to create a federated view of data, he continues. “We take a hybrid approach, meaning we don’t create a big hub where everything comes together. We persist and centralise reference data, but transaction data is brought together dynamically. Siperian Activity Manager goes out and dynamically queries the data and makes it available on an on-demand basis. It also has the ability to push the information back – it allows users to control the flow of data back into the source systems so they are always working from the best data.”
Avox is Siperian’s premier partner for counterparty data at this point, according to Hoang. “We do prefer Avox over any other solutions and believe we have the most opportunities together. The major success in Europe that we are about to announce is in conjunction with Avox. We do support CounterpartyLink and we also work with D&B. We have a lot of experience of working with data providers as they tend to be a good source of additional information to that which financial institutions have internally.”
Hoang observes that both regulation and the desire to grow revenues are driving client and counterparty data projects in Europe. “I’d say on the institutional side, regulations tend to be the lead driver, but right behind it is the fact that institutions want to get better control, have a much better view of how their money is being deployed and what risks they are taking, and be able to act faster, especially to deal with negative or positive corporate actions,” Hoang says.
