Regulations and data silos drive enterprise data management.

Regulatory changes and compartmentalized, or “siloed,” data models are pushing capital markets firms to adopt enterprise data management technology.

Compliance with regulations such as Dodd-Frank, Basel III and Solvency II is a unifying theme for financial services institutions and this is driving demand for EDM.

“Capital markets firm are struggling to cope with the sheer volume of data across the entire enterprise,” Daniel Simpson, CEO of Cadis, told Markets Media. “Data will often be duplicated in different departments and it’s difficult to ensure high quality and auditability. This coupled with compliance around pending regulations means that institutions need to have cleansed and validated data available to those that need it in a timely manner.”

Loomis Sayles & Company, a U.S.-based investment management firm with over $156 billion in assets under management, has selected the Cadis EDM platform to centralize its data management processes.

“The Cadis EDM platform provides Loomis Sayles with a centralized data hub for the management of prices, security reference data and issuers,” said Simpson. “The firm can now conduct data cleansing, validation and exception resolution from a central location.”

In Europe, M&G Investments (M&G), one of Europe’s leading investment managers with £200 billion of assets under management, completed an upgrade to GoldenSource EDM version 8 in May 2011.

Along with the upgrade, M&G extended GoldenSource’s enterprise data management (EDM) platform to utilize the derivatives capabilities, doubling instrument volumes and delivering trusted, consistent information to power key M&G front office systems.

These systems include Algorithmics for risk, Fidessa LatentZero for trading and compliance, and thinkFolio for portfolio management.

“New regulatory directives, such as Solvency II, require firms such as ours to produce increasingly granular information to support risk management and capital adequacy practices,” according to Alan Towndrow, group IS Director at M&G Investments.

“Having access to quality data enables us to pre-empt regulatory demands and ensure our systems are ready for any additional changes,” he said.

In order to meet the standards required by the regulators, firms must be able to present the right data on demand.

“Firms must also be confident that they have quality, validated data to feed into risk engines to determine the best risk strategy while complying with relevant rulings,” said Cadis’ Simpson. “A ‘hub-and-spoke’ data management platform is best suited to this practice than the traditional data warehouse model which firms are now moving away from.”