Business integration solutions provider Vitria and investment data integration solution provider Asset Control are offering a joint solution, the Asset Control Integration Module, to facilitate the dissemination of cleansed and standardised reference data to multiple systems.
The challenge they set out to resolve is the constantly evolving industry data standards that mean financial services institutions must integrate new formats with existing applications. The issues are complex, involving both consolidation of inbound data sources and integration with target applications.
Transaction discrepancies between systems that share data are a major cause of exception processing or broken trades, according to the Securities Industry Association (SIA). Up to 80% of typical bank and brokerage transaction costs are related to handling exceptions. On average, 40% of exceptions are caused by reference data disparities so that improving quality and consistency of reference data is one of the most urgent issues. The SIA has identified standardisation of reference data as one of the key building blocks in straight-through processing (STP).
According to the SIA, more than 30% of industry STP problems are related to reference data mismatches and inaccuracies. A survey conducted by Reuters finds that manual reference data management costs an average $3.2m per year.
