California-based master data management (MDM) provider Siperian says its effort to penetrate the financial services space is gathering momentum, as it signs new clients applying its solution for client on-boarding, risk management, corporate actions processing and compliance. The vendor has also entered into strategic partnerships with Capco and New Jersey-based business and technology consulting firm BusinessEdge. In addition, Siperian has formally announced its partnership with counterparty data specialist Avox, with which it has been working for some time (Reference Data Review, October 2006). It announced a relationship with Avox rival CounterpartyLink late last year.
Siperian will also release in October a new version of its solution – the Siperian MDM Hub XU (replacing the existing XT edition). This contains, the vendor says, enhanced functionality in the areas of security, metadata, reporting and workflow. The aim has been to extend the data governance framework capabilities of the solution, which, according to Tony Spensieri, vice president of financial services at Siperian, will strengthen its appeal to financial services institutions. “The whole notion of data governance is very big within financial institutions,” he says. “It is not about implementing a platform. It’s about rolling it out and getting it adopted by business users. These enhancements will help organisations in the financial services arena have confidence that they can roll our solution out.”
Rather than building ancillary functionality such as reporting dashboards and workflow, Siperian has created web services-based integrations with third-party solutions – with MicroStrategy, Business Objects and Cognos for reporting and with Lombardi for business process management (BPM).
For Texas-headquartered Lombardi, this tie-up with Siperian comes after its recently formed relationship with Capco, which is using its Teamworks BPM engine within its Client Profile Management initiative (Reference Data Review, June 2007). According to Alan Godfrey, its executive vice president for business development and marketing, Lombardi’s BPM solution has been used by its clients in MDM projects across multiple vertical markets. “We have seen clients implementing BPM for MDM in different ways, including reconciling exceptions as they occur – to provide the detection/approval/event routing workflow. We have also seen an expansion into the KYC area, especially in the financial services world, as businesses strive to have one image of customer data across multiple product lines.”
The relationship with Siperian is part of Lombardi’s OEM reseller strategy, launched around two years ago, Godfrey says. “It was through this route that we became involved with Siperian. They evaluated a number of BPM platforms with a view to process-enabling their offering for the purposes of exception management. They did an evaluation, selected us as a partner and we have created a proof of concept.”
The integration between the two solutions was helped by the fact that both are Java-based and have open architectures, he adds. “They speak web services natively. For the purposes of our OEM product we have published a set of APIs which enable external applications to look completely integrated with ours; users think there is one single application. These also allow our partners to take our design environment to promote their own look and feel.”
The types of business processes for which Teamworks is designed are those that typically require human intervention, Godrey says. “We’re a good fit to replace a current manual process. Exceptions are quite often handled by humans – that’s why our solution is a particular fit for this type of problem.”
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