AFTAs 2015: Best IT Integration Initiative—Fidelity Investment Management

FIMT partnered with Bangalore, India-based business technology consultancy Infosys to create the Common Data Environment (CDE), an initiative that has delivered significant success by eliminating 90 percent of redundant data movement and yielding a 75 percent reduction in data duplication by combining over 100 production databases and 120 legacy applications into a single integrated data platform.

But the questions remain: How do you solve a problem like data? How do you store only what you need to have access to in a timely manner, and how do you avoid creating duplicates? If data is to be leveraged as an asset and not carried as a burden, how might it be best organized? Two of Fidelity’s senior data experts, Gopal Subramanian and Ganesh Jayaraman, cite a realization back in 2009 when they decided to move toward storing data according to subject as opposed to individual silos, as key to the firm’s data management strategy. In other words, they decided not to move data to applications, but rather move applications to data. 

Gopal Subramanian, senior vice president, data services, explains: “Just think about it—each one of our divisions within asset management prior to 2008 operated within their respective data silos. Let’s say a fixed-income application needs portfolio information. We designed the portfolio schema to satisfy the need of that application; if there are ‘X’ number of applications in fixed income, we had ‘X’ number of portfolio schema. The same was done in other divisions like equities. As a result, we had over 60 copies of portfolio data and 80 copies of security reference data, etc. By developing a data-centric design and thinking of logical grouping of subject areas, we have minimized duplication, fragmentation and unnecessary data movement.” 

Fidelity is deserving of this award as the CDE marks more than just a well-integrated solution—it can now be considered a large part of the firm’s culture. “We could not have achieved this without support from the highest levels,” explains Jayaraman. Subramanian concurs: “I would give kudos to our senior executives; they bought into this philosophy of contribution and adoption, so that all the divisions in asset management would benefit. They constantly asked questions of the delivery teams as to whether they were adopting or contributing to the CDE. Now it is a part of our DNA—it’s part of everything we do.”

FIMT partnered with Bangalore, India-based business technology consultancy Infosys to create the Common Data Environment (CDE), an initiative that has delivered significant success by eliminating 90 percent of redundant data movement and yielding a 75 percent reduction in data duplication by combining over 100 production databases and 120 legacy applications into a single integrated data platform.