The Need
The need to cut costs in securities transaction processing has been, and still is, an overwhelming imperative for financial institutions. The challenge of managing reference data is the primary cause of a majority of errors at most banks, investment management houses and brokerage firms. The need to address this challenge early on in the lifecycle is immediate, but the issues are complex.
Traditionally, reference data solutions have focused primarily on integrating and reconciling multiple inbound data feeds and data sets to arrive at a “golden copy.” While a centralized “golden copy” reference database is a step in the right direction, it is only the first step. Financial institutions today need the enterprise reference platform to operate in a live transaction environment reconciling, transforming, enriching and distributing data to downstream applications. Such an intelligent, dynamic, meta-data driven reference data solution needs to address the ever-growing regulatory demands of the industry, and the need for granular performance data.
Selection of complementary best-of-breed products for reference data and application integration, which are engineered to work together as a single rapid deployment platform, offers financial services firms the best means of addressing these problems in a scalable, adaptable and cost-efficient manner.
The FDE Solution
For financial institutions, the answer lies with Ness Financial Data Enterprise (FDE) Solution. FDE addresses the problem throughout the entire data lifecycle – from inception to distribution.
The FDE approach emphasizes the importance of processing each data source independently as it is loaded. This means validating each of the source's raw files, transforming the data, and mapping it to a source-specific data model. By doing so, an audit trail is created. This enables each data source to be examined independently of other sources.
By starting with a solid base of known data from each data feed, data quality tests, normalization, cross vendor arbitration, aggregations, and calculations can be developed and scrutinized prior to providing the data for downstream applications. This facilitates clean and consistent data since business rules and logic can be validated prior to populating, for example, a security master.
The next stage is to provide end users with the ability to slice-and-dice the cleansed data in an accurate manner so they can respond rapidly to market dynamics.
With FDE, financial institutions have a cost-effective way to ensure that high-quality data flows into the applications that support the trade and investment decision lifecycle.
FDE Overview
Ness FDE is an enterprise reference data management solution for financial services, built on top of a scalable, flexible, metadata-driven, high-performance, and open service-oriented architecture. FDE has been developed to:
Streamline reference data operations leveraging existing enterprise infrastructure
Manage and maintain accurate and timely reference data to deliver high-quality client services and high rate of return (ROR) on investment and trading strategies
Provide flexible, on-demand, and customized data slices to various stakeholder desks within investment management firms and brokerages
Improve efficiency and productivity of operations groups within the enterprise to deliver highly personalized reference data feeds
Provide a comprehensive solution for enterprise data including historical and reference data, client and counter-party data, risk and performance analysis data – covering equities, fixed income, money markets, futures, and mutual fund data with a choice of delivery options to suit specific organizational needs
FDE Value Proposition
The primary value proposition of FDE can be characterized by its:
Ability to dynamically resolve and cross reference multiple industry-standard and market identifiers for a given security
Ability to manage specific customer data requirements based on their entitlements and preferences
Flexible packaging addressing low-end needs (entry-level solution priced in an a la carte mode) to high-end “total security service” needs
Feature-rich interface allowing business users to introduce new products with rapid time to market
FDE has been designed as a scalable and flexible solution that can be easily customized or augmented to support other markets or verticals within or outside the financial services industry.
Salient Features
Enterprise data models
Security, pricing and descriptive masters
Counter-party and client masters
Transactional masters (products, fund accounting and transfer agency)
Net asset value (NAV) exception process monitoring and management
Cross-referencing capabilities for international industry-standard identifiers
Meta-data-driven inbound feed loading, transformation and enrichment, transaction management, performance analytics, extraction and distribution
Rule-driven inbound and outbound processing of reference, research, corporate actions, portfolio, and performance data
Slice-and-dice capabilities at the field level
Single, multiple and hierarchical source selection
Outbound distribution engine supporting mapping of reference data to any internal or external formats or APIs
Meta-data-driven preferences and entitlements and data-extraction engine
Supports multiple outbound modes – on demand, event-driven, batch and real-time
Portfolio management
Holdings/positions management
Multilevel monitoring, alerts and notifications management, for inbound and outbound data management and transaction processing
Multi-tenet client and user and entitlement management
Reports and regulatory audit trail
Key Benefits
Realize significant reductions in operational costs with rapid time to market and ease of implementation of new products and offerings
Minimize overall risk exposure and improve capital deployment
Better comply with regulatory requirements
Achieve rapid deployment
Contact sales for more details.
