Asset Control Releases AC Data Suite for Data Management

Asset Control has released its AC Data Suite of modular solutions and tools for financial-services firms to combine the management of in-house and outsourced data and services. The AC Data Suite includes new off-the-shelf data models, feed interfaces and vendor mappings and is interoperable with Asset Control's AC In-House and ACDEX outsourced data management solutions.

"The financial-services industry is very focused on data management and how they can reduce costs and risks and make it easier," says Bridget Piraino, vice president of marketing and alliances at Asset Control. "Some are looking at outsourcing today, but it's not an all or nothing situation."

She adds that smaller firms might be interested in outsourcing the entire data management process with AC Data Suite as they are having difficulty justifying the costs associated with setting up the infrastructure in-house or maintaining existing infrastructures. But Piraino says that larger firms are looking to outsource the management of more commoditized data such as that from Bloomberg and Reuters while mission-critical data can remain managed in-house.

The AC Data Suite can be mixed and matched to meet the financial institution's specific needs. The suite includes AC Plus, Asset Control's solution for data aggregation, cleansing and storage which also includes the ISO 15022 data dictionary, pre-built mapping tables and cleansing rules and off-the-shelf interfaces to major data vendors, the AC Desktop for system management and model extension and AC Web Client for data access; ACDEX, the outsourced version of AC Plus which consolidates multiple vendor data feeds into "golden copy" data sets; and AC Connectivity which provides connectivity to third-parties, proprietary data and platforms such as Tibco.

The AC Connectivity functionality also enables AC Plus and ACDEX users to communicate as a sort of industry-level data exchange, says Piraino. "Clients of Asset Control who have relationships with each other can leverage this architecture to share information, instructions and all types of data," she adds. The AC Data Suite core data model is also aligned with the ISO 15022 data dictionary to help standardize data across an enterprise.

"One of the major problems in the financial-services industry is that when business lines had a lot of money to spend they went out and created systems and set up their own mini-infrastructures or mini-silos, but in today's economic climate that's no longer feasible," says Piraino. "It's too costly but often it means different business units end up making decisions on different sets of data. So this can help them eliminate the multiple data silos and create one, consistent 'golden copy' data set that can be used across the enterprise."