Capital markets firms need to aggregate data stored across silos.

Regulatory compliance is a driving force behind a speed-up in data integration projects at capital markets firms.

“Regulatory requirements in the U.S. and Europe are forcing companies to access, integrate, manage and govern their data,” Peter Ku, director of financial services solution marketing at Informatica. “The Dodd-Frank Act puts a lot of emphasis on data governance, in particular the quality and consistency of reference data like securities and counterparties.”

Informatica’s acquisition of 29West in 2010 provided it with an ultra-low latency messaging capability for capital markets.

The 29West technology delivers an order of magnitude improvement in latency, throughput and predictability compared to traditional data delivery approaches, including hand coding and near real-time messaging systems, the company says.

“In capital markets applications, it’s all about data integration,” Ku said. “We can provide extremely fast messaging technology for front-office apps.”

Informatica’s messaging technology is based on removing unnecessary components such as brokers and daemons– programs that run in the background rather than under the direct control of a user– from the dta path.

“Other approaches to low latency have revolved around moving broker and daemon logic from software brokers into proprietary hardware,” Ku said. “We have a daemon-less architecture that eliminates the need to accelerate something that’s an unnecessary component for message flow.”

Data in many firms remains locked in product, channel and business unit silos. The inability to create a single view of the customer or to synchronize data in a timely fashion across multiple systems makes it difficult to achieve a holistic view of customer relationships.

“This silo-driven approach is inadequate to meet new requirements, as data is stored in multiple data formats across a myriad of disparate systems,” said Ku. “We provide a single, unified enterprise data integration platform to enable firms to realize the full business value of their enterprise data assets.”