Vendor giant SunGard has finally completed a year long integration project focused on expanding the content of its market data solution MarketMap to cover corporate actions data from Exchange Data International (EDI). Robert Jeanbart, global head of market data and information services for SunGard’s global trading business, explains to Reference Data Review that the integration was prompted by client requests and is just one of the top three priorities identified by its customers to be tackled this year.
“We selected EDI because it provided the most complete coverage of the corporate actions world,” explains Jeanbart. SunGard selected the corporate actions vendor from a group of three candidates due to its geographical coverage, focus on data quality, integration capabilities and its price tag, he says. The vendor was therefore looking for a data provider with global coverage, a focus on completeness and accuracy and a compatible technical model for integration purposes.
Although Jeanbart is unable to elaborate on the other contenders under consideration, he notes that they are all providers that are not in direct competition with SunGard itself in the data provision stakes, thus ruling out a number of the larger players on the block.
The vendor indicates that the new consolidated corporate actions feed will help MarketMap customers receive a range of corporate information via the same user interface as the price information that is already being provided over the platform. Jeanbart contends it will also help to enrich MarketMap’s securities instrument and time-series databases with comprehensive price history adjustments, as well as merger and acquisition data, changes of ISIN, stock adjustments, capital changes and dividend payments.
He explains that a user will be able to look up any historical data on a company via the interface and see this data in a chart or drill down to data specifics such as dividend dates. The feed from EDI feed covers data for 78,000 equities, 4,100 depository receipts and 2,700 exchange-traded funds; all of which had to be integrated into SunGard’s ASP platform over the course of a year.
Although EDI is the main source of corporate actions data for MarketMap, SunGard also receives, largely European, corporate actions data from German provider WM Datenservice, notes Jeanbart.
The integration process for the EDI data was fairly laborious and detailed due to the nature of corporate actions data, he continues. “A lot of data management work and adjustments were required in order to integrate the data fully into the end products,” he says. “We had to get fairly deep into the structure of the products to make best use of the data.”
The take up of the solution has been “in line” with what SunGard expected, says Jeanbart. “Almost all of the clients that requested the data have since signed up and others that hadn’t asked are also on board.” The vendor currently has around 10,000 users on MarketMap and Jeanbart expects most, if not all, of these users to sign up by the end of the year.
Corporate actions is only one part of the vendor’s market data focus this year, however. Jeanbart indicates that SunGard is also working on adding global fixed income data to the MarketMap offering before the end of the year and is also adding functionality to allow for the platform to become multi-lingual. “We expect to release the fixed income data in three phases, the first of which is due in the early third quarter of this year. The last phase will be completed by mid-summer,” he elaborates.
The addition of all this data means that the vendor is “slowly but surely bridging the data gap” between itself and its competitors, concludes Jeanbart.
