SmartStream, the financial Transaction Lifecycle Management specialist, announced significant progress for its DClear business, a year after its launch. With reference data on the agenda again at this years Sibos conference, a utility service model providing clean, consistent reference data as a service has come to the fore as the industry wrestles with data quality and its impact on risk management.
Philippe Chambadal, CEO of SmartStream, said: We believe that by looking to address the issue of reference data in the market and its impact on the transaction lifecycle as a whole and not on an institution by institution basis will have a lasting impact and deliver significant benefits to market participants.
A year on from its launch the DClear services, including securities cross referencing and a data dictionary have gained considerable traction in the markets. It has delivered significant project milestones including mapping more than 3.5 million security identifiers, equating to just over half of all the know identifiers and approximately 350 Exchanges. As a result of this development work, DClear now delivers a Central Data Hub hosting a shared common source of reference data available to banks, custodians, broker/dealers, money managers.
One client, a leading US-based Asset Manager, is using the DClear service to manage securities cross referencing, lowering its trade breaks and strengthening its risk controls. A spokesperson for the firm said: Prior to DClear a major trading group in the UK were primarily maintaining the matching manually between the web sites, Reuters, and Bloomberg. This approach caused delay and limitation on the volumes, loosing precious times in trading. With DClear, we eliminate all the internal jobs and automate all of the matching; allowing the traders focus on their core competency of trading.
In the US, DClear has enabled us to perform order routing automation internally. Previously the information was sent to the Prime Broker to execute the trade. We would need to staff up a group of dedicated experts on a 24×6 bases to map the disparate data coming in via multiple sources to a centralised location. By outsourcing this to DClear we are able to reduce our resource cost while still getting the product we need.
Reference data accounts for almost half of trade failures, resulting in billions of dollars lost in opportunity, says David Penney, EVP Strategy and Product Development at SmartStream. Reference data is costly to acquire and maintain, duplicative across the industry and of no strategic value. DClear Utilities removes that significant cost overhead and provides firms with superior quality reference data as the basis for their daily operations.
D.C.