Vendors Lay Out Their Plans for Reference-Data Services
Accenture Lines Up Major Data Feeds
Fresh off the heels of developing and implementing the DTCC's Global Corporate Actions Validation (GCA) Service -- which many industry sources say is the hardest problem to solve -- Accenture is busy developing its Management Reference Data Service (MRDS) in its Madrid Capital Markets Delivery Center. MRDS will cover end-of-day pricing, real-time market data, historical pricing and analytics, legal entity data and market events, as well as corporate actions and client counter-party information.
Drawing upon its DTCC experience, Accenture will expand the same data cleansing teams that are located in Toronto, London and Shanghai -- a total of about 60 people -- that it has established for GCA. Another key ingredient to the service is the data vendor. Reuters and Telekurs have already announced that they're going to be part of Accenture's service, and Bloomberg has agreed to participate on a client-by-client basis, says Bill Cline, partner at Accenture.
In a demo at the consulting firm's New York City offices, Accenture officials show MRDS bringing in all major vendor data feeds -- Bloomberg, Reuters, Telekurs and FT Interactive -- as well as legacy feeds, in a raw format and normalizing them using Asset Control's data model and its own enrichment layer. Accenture also envisions taking in the DTCC GCA feed, SunGard pricing data and the Specific Fixed Income Provider, a feed it is creating for illiquid bonds. "Accenture pioneered the [managed data service] concept, noting that Accenture has previously run market data for trading floors including JPMorgan Securities and the London Stock Exchange since 1992. Now we're taking it to the totality of asset classes and types," claims Cline.
Accenture says it will accommodate the different business rules that customers prefer to create their golden copy. It will allow the capability of clients to have a platinum service above and beyond the standard golden copy, says Patricia Tsien, partner. "They can have their own rules combined with golden copy data to create a separate, proprietary golden copy," she says. For example, says Tsien, customers with proprietary ways of reading prospectuses or calculating VAR (value-at-risk) can allow that through an added layer of business rules.
However, competitors point out that Accenture is using the Asset Control data model internally, but that the managed service has to integrate with whatever data model or container the client uses internally for storing the reference data. For example, many securities firms use the FTI data model to get data into downstream applications. If a firm "is happy using FTI inside, they'll continue to use that stuff," says competitor Dale Richards, president of SunGard Enterprise Data Management Solutions, who claims Accenture is trying to persuade prospective clients to use Asset Control's model.
But Accenture officials say this is not a problem and that it can feed data from Asset Control into whatever data model is used internally.
Tsien says Accenture is bringing in all data feeds as well as legacy feeds in a raw format and normalizing them to Asset Control's out-of-the-box data model and then enhancing it with its own model. Each vendor's raw data feed uses different symbology and formats and has to be normalized to a common format to do a comparison to create a golden copy.
Accenture is not alone, its rivals are also targeting the same business opportunity. SunGard Data Management Solutions is looking at launching a pricing service for homogenous, commonly used data. Ivy is Editor-at-Large for Advanced Trading and Wall Street & Technology. Ivy is responsible for writing in-depth feature articles, daily blogs and news articles with a focus on automated trading in the capital markets. As an industry expert, Ivy has reported on a myriad ... View Full Bio
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