BNY Mellon Asset Management has chosen Markit’s Enterprise Data Management (EDM) platform to enable the $1.5 trillion-dollar asset manager to unify significant components of its data management operations and eliminate manual processes.

Markit was selected after an extensive due diligence process and a Proof of Concept. The first phase of the project will focus on amalgamating, cleansing and validating index data to create a master dataset for analytics. In subsequent phases, BNY Mellon plans to expand the usage of the platform to support the growing data management needs of its global subsidiaries.

“Organizations on the buy and sell side recognise the need for an enterprise-wide platform to take control of their data and break down silos,” said Daniel Simpson, managing director and head of enterprise software at Markit. “BNY Mellon is doing just this by taking a top down approach to managing its data across the firm and its multiple global subsidiaries. The implementation will enable the investment manager to have complete confidence in the data used across the business.”

Regulation will reduce financial services profitability by a third by 2015 unless institutions implement appropriate EDM strategies, according to IDC Financial Insights.

“Strengthening data management processes, technology, and most importantly culture is essential to the survival of an institution, and projects to implement enterprise data management (EDM) platforms have rightly received a great deal of attention in the past 24 months, IDC analyst Matt Sauer said in a report.

EDM projects will be at the core of all compliance investment, and unless institutions focus on risk and compliance data strategies and a deep review of data ownership across the enterprise, the cost of compliance will be crippling and will likely have an overly negative impact on performance for the better part of the decade, Sauer said.

The IDC report noted that installation of the Markit EDM platform at Northern Trust was achieved very quickly, with the development of the first set of solutions completed within a 10-week window. Though it was not the plan to complete the implementation in such a short time frame, this had to be hastened to meet the deadlines of new client implementation.

“The ability to do the design and development within Markit EDM was absolutely key to successfully completing the implementation of the solution within 10 weeks,” said Sauer. “A standard development approach, on the other hand, would be expected to have taken several weeks more.”

Fundamentally, the implementation of the Markit EDM system at Northern Trust did not significantly impact upon the business, as it did not disrupt trade data consumption or how this information flowed downstream. The greatest change was to processes, specifically those related to data access with the business now taking on greater responsibility for requirement acquisition, design, and development, significantly shortening the development life cycle.