Shared Data Services

摘要

Several consulting firms and one vendor are looking to build separate utilities that would allow broker-dealers and investment managers to outsource their data services to achieve cost savings. A second model being considered is a utility owned and operated by the industry firms themselves. Why It's Important: Data management has become a focal point of all securities and investment firms, as institutions understand that if their data isn't clean, their trades will fail. Individually, all financial-services firms are working to create processes to maintain a single, clean copy of data, known as golden copy. This copy is being used to feed all downstream applications, ranging from equity and fixed-income trading platforms to risk-management, compliance and back-office systems. But data management is costly. The industry currently spends tens of millions of dollars processing and scrubbing historical and descriptive data to create that master file. In addition, much of the data is no different from firm to firm. As a result, data has become a commodity that many say can be outsourced in order to achieve economies of scale.