Your portfolio managers and analysts researched the markets, placed their bets and made their trades to benefit your firm’s clients. Now your IT and operations teams need to manage and process a barrage of data generated by the trading activity against the backdrop of limited resources, cost controls, creaky systems, time crunches and risk management. But is data management your firm’s core competency? Is it really where you should be focused?
You can outsource routine, repetitive data management and gain a range of benefits that improve current operations and position you better for future business. Vendors can collect, aggregate, normalize and cleanse data; identify and remediate exceptions; and deliver ready-to-use data to your systems for you. When choosing the right vendor, it’s important to look for:
- Broad data and complete asset class coverage including benchmark and index data, corporate actions, security reference data, prices and exchange rates.
- A good fit with your existing systems and operations, and deployment options that align with your plans—whether moving wholesale to a managed services approach or opting for a more phased method.
- Robust technology infrastructure, reliable managed services and the latest hardware and software.
- Comprehensive service that spans storage, consolidation, distribution, reconciliation and more, along with robust SLAs, governance and 24/7 support.
- Customization options. You know your data requirements best, and you may need to customize the service with built-in business rules enforcement.
- Experience. Specialist providers with detailed knowledge of financial data products, formats and standards can bring best practices in data sourcing, aggregation and mastering.
Through managed data services, you can reap many benefits, including:
- Time savings and efficiency gains through automation and vendor core competency—focus your resources on the work that differentiates your business.
- Future-proofing your operations—scale more easily, expand data sources and feeds as needed, bring multiple data streams together and meet increasingly data-intensive business process requirements.
- Optimal data quality—capture source data changes automatically, along with regular system maintenance and upgrades; minimize operational risk and meet regulatory mandates for data consistency, transparency and accuracy.
- Cost savings gained through vendors’ data buying power.
Now that you know what to seek and how you’ll benefit, find out what we can do to help.