A-Team Insight Exchange is a new event series for 2010, which will combine A-Team’s expertise in financial markets IT with thought leadership from world-class technology innovators and practical experience from financial market practitioners.
Since its decision to sign up for the MoneyMate investment data management solution in October last year, Schroders has been working closely with the vendor to control the aggregation and cleansing of their product information for presentation on websites. Gerard Walsh, head of change management for the web and customer relationship management (CRM) at Schroders, and Ronan Brennan, chief technology officer at MoneyMate, explain that the solution is aimed at enhancing the timeliness, accuracy and consistency of Schroders’ product information, which is communicated to their clients and distribution channels.

















Getting buy in from senior management and understanding from those at the grassroots level with regards to tackling data management challenges has become much easier as a result of the current industry focus on data, said Shannon Walker, IT architect at Deutsche Bank, to delegates to yesterday’s TSAM event in London. However, she warned that firms must involve those in the “middle”, namely end users from the business side, in data management projects in order to ensure they are on board with the changes and that the overall project is a success.
Rather than pressures related to regulation, the business concerns of the front office are driving a spate of investment into revamping firms’ counterparty risk systems, according to a recent survey conducted by risk solution vendor Algorithmics. The investments are focused largely on credit value adjustment (CVA), which allows for more dynamic pricing of counterparty credit risk into new trades, says Bob Boettcher, senior director of product strategy at Algorithmics.
Italian banking group UniCredit is currently focused on extending the coverage of its data warehouse, which was rolled out in 2004, beyond accounting and regulatory reporting related data items to other reference data items, says Alberto Ricciotti, head of group pricing at the bank. A key success factor in this process has been in the data management team’s ability to engage internal and external end users of this data and the development of “Esperanto” between data sets, he explains.
In a move that confirms that the worlds of the front office and the back office are moving ever closer, UBS’ executive in charge of market data sourcing and strategy, David Berry has indicated that the bank is using Celoxica’s hardware appliance-based data feed handlers to process its market and reference data. The rationale behind the decision was to speed up the processing of the ever-increasing volumes of reference data, including corporate actions, and increase efficiency, says Berry.
Allied Irish Bank’s (AIB) enterprise data warehouse project manager Michael McMorrow is a great proponent of Teradata’s functionally neutral and self-managing approach to data storage. The bank rolled out the vendor’s Teradata Warehouse solution a few years ago and is now focused on keeping up with the data management changes required as a result of new source system inputs, such as accounting system changes, he explains.



