SST Awards 2018: Best Sell-Side Product for 2018—UnaVista, London Stock Exchange Group

The platform was established in 2008, although its roots go back to 2004 to the proprietary technology LSEG had developed and was using in-house. “We had already been using the technology in the mid-2000s when we launched our Sedol global reference data master file service in 2004,” says Mark Husler, CEO of LSEG UnaVista. “We re-platformed the technology onto UnaVista because we needed to expand the database significantly to cover global multi-asset class instruments.”

Husler explains that when LSEG took the product to market in 2008, it received a lot of positive feedback on its underlying technology, which prompted it to consider leveraging the technology with the view to helping clients with their regulatory reporting mandates. “We had a few years of building out the service and the client base and we grew from being a startup to the largest approved reporting mechanism (ARM)—a Financial Conduct Authority (FCA)-regulated function in the UK—in that initial five-year period,” Husler says. “As we started looking more holistically around the changing regulatory landscape—the European Market Infrastructure Regulation (EMIR) was on the horizon with the trade repository regime—it made sense for us to build out the portfolio. So we built out the trade repository service on the same technology base as the Mifid ARM.” 

UnaVista is regulated by the FCA and European Securities and Markets Authority (Esma) in the provision of software to its 1,000+ clients, providing them with peace of mind that the service underpinning some of their mission-critical functions is robust and reliable. “There is the assurance and credibility that the software is not built with one firm in mind—it is a community service,” Husler says. The platform’s base functionality also appeals to clients, Husler explains, especially when it comes to the often complex and laborious process of trade reporting. “We allow our clients to send us data in any format and via any communication method and then we do all the data transformation, normalization and enrichment,” he says, adding that UnaVista also provides clients with systems and controls, something now expected by regulators. 

Previous winners of this category include Numerix (2013), GoldenSource (2014), Quartet FS (2015) and R3 (2016), while last year the award went to Nasdaq thanks to its Smarts Trade Surveillance platform.