End user focus characterizes successful implementations.

Capital markets firms face thorny challenges associated with reference data management, which in order to be tackled require taking the perspective of the end user.

“The success of a reference data implementation will be measured primarily on its ability to adopt and retain data consumers across the enterprise,” Bob Wolfert, managing director at First Derivatives, told Markets Media.

Adopting and retaining data consumers requires three basic core competencies, according to Wolfert.

First is the ability to represent data to the consumer in a manner that allows them to rapidly and seamlessly integrate with the solution.

Second is the ability to rapidly adopt new data sources, represent new data classes and extend modeled representations.
Third is the ability to deploy data incrementally, and avoid the risk of a big bang deployment approach.

“While there are a number of other architectural and functional requirements behind a successful reference data management implementation, the failure to address the three core competencies will inevitably result in a less successful implementation,” said Wolfert.

First Derivatives’ Delta Data Factory (DDF) is a hosted data management service that provides targeted reference data processing as a utility to buyers and sellers of data.

“DDF provides the ability to transform, consolidate and repackage data across a vast array of business information, enabling a firm to consolidate multiple information assets more quickly and efficiently,” said Wolfert.

Data vendors and publishers, as well as financial institutions, use DDF to outsource the processing and normalization of multiple in-bound reference data sources into enterprise data management or proprietary security master environments, Wolfert said.

Thomson Reuters’ pricing and reference data group has implemented DDF for use internally as a component in its data delivery strategy.
Thomson Reuters selected DDF as a managed service “data formatting factory” to assist in its strategy to offer clients speedy integration and adoption of reference and pricing data, according to Tim Rice, managing director of global pricing and reference data at Thomson Reuters.

First Derivatives has developed a Reference Data Management Solutions toolkit that enables clients to provide solutions to end consumers in the method in which they want to consume and use the data.

“Our approach is to provide a plumbing infrastructure that promotes the rapid orchestration of reference data solutions,” said Wolfert.