Information management is now a strategic priority.

Issues of data management driven by regulatory reforms are causing financial firms to seek out-of-the-box technology solutions.

Regulatory focus on data will cause financial institutions to look at data as an important resource to be managed and analyzed as a part of institutional governance, and not just as an ad hoc consequence of implementing one system or another.

“Increasing calls for transparency and governance and the pure number of regulatory changes on the horizon are putting real pressure on the data management and governance functions,” Phil Lynch, CEO of Asset Control, told Markets Media.  “Data is now a strategic concern with a large number of touch points across the business, bringing with it requirements which are changing much more quickly than ever before.”

In the derivatives markets, the move to centralized clearing is an industry- changing initiative, and much work needs to be done in successfully managing portfolios of more complex derivative products.

“It is already having a massive impact because the regulators are demanding to see watertight, automated, repeatable processes with complete audit trails,” Ronan Brennan, chief technology officer at MoneyMate, told Markets Media.

“In order to deliver this you need to frame and structure your process with technology and services that empower the data stewards within the asset management firm to take control of the process, apply the data quality management as mandated by the governance and strategy as laid out by that firm,” Brennan said.

The need to crunch data to generate real-time risk performance is beyond the capacity of even the largest, most tech-savvy companies. However, solutions in the form of data fabrics, messaging and virtualization aim to address the situation.”

“Capital markets data is the most complicated in the world,” said Lynch.  “Take a fixed income instrument–to understand an individual fixed income instrument properly over one hundred fields need to be reviewed. Traditional data warehouses will struggle with this level of sophistication.”

Asset Control, a specialized securities data firm, has developed insights into markets and how different participants need to access and use data. Lynch said.

“Messaging middleware and multicasting have a key role to play in terms of distribution – firms need to be sure these systems can cope with real time versus intraday, or end of day requirements,” he said.

Noted Brennan, “At the end of the day, warehousing of data is an important part of the data management process, but what is more important is the strategy employed vis-à-vis how and where data will be warehoused e.g. single massive warehouse versus multi-tiered approach and hierarchy of warehouse silos, operational data stores, and fit-for-process data marts.”