SST Awards 2018: Best Data Provider to the Sell Side—SIX

This year’s win is largely down to SIX’s hard work and innovative response to the changing regulatory landscape, where banks are struggling to tackle issues surrounding tax reporting and compliance. To begin with, the firm’s database covers 27 million securities and connects customers to over 1,500 global sources of information. Its core data offering, Valordata Feed (VDF), cross references of its securities master and corporate actions data, providing information services to assist firms to meet their tax and legal requirements under sanction rules, Internal Revenue Service (IRS) regulation 871M, Packaged Retail and Insurance-Based Investment Products (Priips), and the revised Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (Mifid II), to name a few. 

One of SIX’s core objectives to date has been its move toward providing data as a service and offloading work from its clients. Given its industry position and data coverage, the firm can create detailed rule sets, conduct analysis and then provide that information to its clients through regular updates. “While vendors are just selling the raw data to customers, we have actually used the data that we have in our database to create a higher level of service that clients can very easily just take from SIX and implement into their workflow,” says Phil Lynch, global head of markets, products and strategy at SIX.

Last year also saw the launch of SIX’s global regulatory hub, designed to enable the buy side and the sell side to connect in order to exchange data and documents. The platform acts as a one-stop shop where firms can access up-to-date regulatory information through a single interface. The hub also allows for compliance capabilities to track the lineage of information sourced, where it can be archived into the client’s system.

Last year was clearly a successful year for the data technology firm, but now with the focus on 2018 and the year ahead, it aims to assist clients to grow and scale their business by developing their data capabilities and focusing on areas that will minimize workload, inefficiencies and costs. “This is a new direction for SIX and it was extremely well established in 2017, but we see this as a new direction that has a long period of relevance that customers will be coming to us with all kinds of needs,” says Lynch.