Q&A
SIFMA Tech talk
WSL: WHAT IS THE NUMBER ONE REQUEST COMING FROM CLIENTS? MARC ALVAREZ, SENIOR DIRECTOR, REFERENCE DATA INFRASTRUCTURE, INTERACTIVE DATA Clients want their data aggregated into a single model, with a single industry standard interface and delivered in forms appropriate to their workflows. They are looking to leverage our scale as a global data supplier to help them achieve better time-to-market and more comprehensive risk management, accompanied by lower and less volatile operating overheads. This transition to a more flexible, on demand operating model changes the nature of our business significantly. In the early stages, we are seeing significant improvements in our customers’ ability realize time to value and improved ROI. MIKE ATKINS, MANAGING DIRECTOR, EDM COUNCIL Almost without exception, financial institutions of all sizes understand the data requirement. They understand the concept, they understand the data mandate, they understand the importance of it. They don’t know how to do it. So the number one question I get is about where do we start, and where do we start from being able to implement this as a governance concept within our organization. So it’s shifted from, “What do we have to do?” to “How do we do it?” WSL: DO MARKET PARTICIPANTS HAVE THE TOOLS THEY NEED TO EFFECTIVELY MANAGE THEIR STRATEGIES AND RISKS? ALEXEI MILLER, PRESIDENT, DATA ART Absolutely they do, whether they have them at the appropriate price is another matter. Technology of all sorts is readily available and, increasingly, it becomes available instantly, which is a big deal. When you need to address something in a timely fashion, you can no longer afford a six-month deployment cycle. Technologies like the cloud
and virtualization are a good way to shorten development cycles that way. It’s still very pricey, but in terms of sheer availability, the tools are definitely here. TERENCE FAHERTY, HEAD OF PRODUCT STRATEGY, BONAIRE The industry has challenges with the volumes of data and how to make sense of the data. The data is more readily available, it’s available in a faster timeframe than it ever has been and in mass quantities of it. The hard part is consuming it so that you can make logical decisions based on that. WSL: OF THE CONCERNS YOUR CLIENTS HAVE FOR THE COMING YEAR, IS TECHNOLOGY OR REGULATION MORE PRESSING, AND WHY? IAN DANIC, MANAGING DIRECTOR, ELECTRA INFORMATION SYSTEMS One reads in the press that regulation is something that everyone is talking about, but I don’t know about that. There is obviously a concern being expressed by institutional money that hedge funds have good systems in place, but I don’t know to what extent it’s affecting systems decisions. You want to have a system in place that you can get data out of, you want to have systems in place that are integrated. But presumably if you have a good system in place you’ll be able to meet the regulation regardless of how the regulations express themselves. SAKURA PINEDA, GLOBAL MARKETING, NOMURA RESEARCH INSTITUTE We deal with both the buyside and sellside in Japan. On the sellside, the settlement and clearing side, they are coming up with shorter settlement cycles, so we are trying to update our system as the regulations are going to change. For the buyside, we are looking more in the Asian region, and in Asia regulation is different country by country, so it’s very hard for everyone to catch up with the different regulations. Unless regulation becomes more integrated in the region, it’s really limited what technology can do unless that process is standardized, so we have to come in and help manually. WSL: WHAT IS THE BIGGEST TECH HURDLE TO OVERCOME IN THE NEXT 12 MONTHS? JEFFREY WALLLI L??59 %9 ?AIQ9H??MU9 I?
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