SST Awards 2018: Best Sell-Side Data Management Product—IHS Markit

According to the London-headquartered firm, it is serving the expanding range of new use-cases for enterprise data management (EDM) solutions. Andrew Eisen, managing director of EDM product management and cloud strategy at IHS Markit, says specifically on the sell side, the three main use-cases are: independent price verification (IPV), product control, and the Fundamental Review of the Trading Book (FRTB). He tells Waters that banks are under growing pressure to meet regulatory, audit and internal management requirements for IPV. The firm’s EDM IPV solution helps banks automate their asset price validation processes and reduce operational risks.

Meanwhile, its product control solution has been designed to meet two challenges faced by customers: the lack of accurate and efficient auditability around P&L reporting, and the need for reliable P&L analysis to help improve commercial decisions. 

EDM is also being used to support data management requirements under the FRTB regulation.

The firm’s longer-term strategy focuses on building an end-to-end data ecosystem. Eisen says this comprises four components: data management, data warehousing, data delivery and data governance. 

Enterprise data management focuses on acquiring, validating, enriching and reconciling data across multiple sources, while data warehousing involves consolidating and storing historical data on a single platform and making it readily available for client and regulatory reporting requirements. IHS Markit EDM’s data delivery component focuses on ensuring data is aggregated and presented in the right format and at the right time as needed by each business user. “In the past 12 months, we’ve invested heavily in enhancing the user interface and APIs so that users can easily access and query data through a rich user interface or through the RESTful API,” Eisen says. 

As for data governance, the firm is working to further develop its offering in the next few months. It already enables clients to create a single version of the truth and provide a transparent audit trail. 

IHS Markit is also building a data dictionary to provide internal data definitions and visualization for end-users, as well as external dictionaries to support new APIs and data governance products. 

Eisen sees a need to provide a central glossary or dictionary that is both business-facing for primary end-users and technical-facing for downstream consuming systems, as clients look for greater understanding of the data within their organizations.