Cordium, a provider of compliance consulting to the financial services industry, has implemented Electra Data for Compliance Employee Level Filing (ELF) platform. This eliminates the need for Cordium to establish, manage and maintain data feeds with brokers that are servicing its clients by enabling the flow of data via direct feeds managed by Electra on Cordium’s behalf.

“For anyone who’s ever worked with trying to set up direct feeds with brokers, it can be a hassle dealing with a lot of the large institutions, and what’s great about Electra is that they’ve spent years forging these relationships already,” Jordan Schwartz, Cordium’s director of global software solutions, told Markets Media. “So we’re able to pass that on to our end users and leverage that benefit in that we’re not starting from scratch, and our users aren’t starting from scratch when they want to start to bring in a feed of personal trading data.”

The addition of Electra Data offers an alternative to existing account aggregation connections, providing access to over 500 direct brokerage feeds through its deployment within the Compliance ELF platform.

“In the past, we maintained direct feeds ourselves, but that was not a scalable solution for us because every time we wanted to add a new broker feed, we had to work on forming and establishing a relationship with the broker,” said Schwartz. “What we’re able to do now with Electra is leverage their relationships with the brokers, and their technology.”

Electra Data provides consolidated securities, cash position and transaction information from more than 500 global custodians, prime brokers, broker-dealers and other financial institutions.

“Our clients are made up of institutional investment managers, hedge funds, and service providers,” Ian Danic, executive director at Electra, told Markets Media. “The lion’s share, in terms of numbers, would be the institutional managers and hedge funds. The business that is growing fastest is the hedge fund area.”

The collection and transformation of data for many investment managers and hedge funds isn’t necessarily core to their operation, noted Danic.

“Obviously they have to bring the data in, but because we’ve concentrated so much of our attention on making sure that we have automated feeds in place and that we have transformation technology that allows us to handle the data, we can provide that service as a specialized provider, saving our client from having to do something that is maybe outside of their core competence and that wouldn’t necessarily be considered a competitive advantage,” he said.

Photo via Cordium