Sell-Side Technology Awards 2014: Best Sell-Side Data Management Product — GoldenSource

If this year’s Sell-Side Technology Awards are remembered for one thing, it will be that 2014 was the year that a third-party technology provider other than Markit finally managed to win a much coveted data management category. Markit has owned this space in all Waters awards since the inaugural Buy-Side Technology Awards in 2007. But no more. This year, the gong went to GoldenSource, thanks to its Enterprise Data Management (EDM) platform, a name that ironically it shares with the product it has finally displaced—Markit EDM.

GoldenSource’s business is built on the back of its EDM suite, designed to underpin user-firms’ initiatives to establish a golden copy of firm-wide reference data repositories for securities and products, customers and counterparties. The platform is also designed to aggregate positions, balances, and transactions to help users generate real-time, enterprise-wide views of their risk and exposures across all areas of the business. In terms of interoperability between applications and the need to share data across the business, irrespective of the business process involved and the asset class, GoldenSource maintains connections to a range of market and reference data suppliers, and provides pre-written interfaces with and for all applications that require clean and reliable reference data, including trading; risk management and compliance; settlement; portfolio accounting; and other front-, middle- and back-office functions.

Now that there’s another data management vendor on the block to challenge Markit’s hegemony, it will be interesting to see whether GoldenSource has the wherewithal to back up its maiden win with future success. It’s unlikely that Markit’s dominance in its traditional buy-side stronghold is going to be challenged any time soon, but stranger things have been happened and not many would have bet against Markit cleaning up again in this space again at this year’s awards. This win might well be the start of interesting times in the data management space.   

GoldenSource’s business is built on the back of its EDM suite, designed to underpin user-firms’ initiatives to establish a golden copy of firm-wide reference data repositories for securities and products, customers and counterparties.