SST Awards 2018 Winners' Circle: UnaVista, London Stock Exchange Group

London Stock Exchange Group’s UnaVista offering collected two categories at this year’s SST Awards: best sell-side middle-office platform and best sell-side product for 2018. Can you summarize what UnaVista is and what challenges it addresses for the sell side?

Mark Husler, CEO of LSEG UnaVista: UnaVista is London Stock Exchange Group’s regulatory reporting platform. The current platform has been helping firms to report for global regulations since 2011. In short, the platform helps firms to organize their own data in preparation for reporting and then automates much of the reporting process, as well as provides audited workflow and detailed customizable dashboard reports. 

While we are very proud of the platform and its reliability (99.99 percent uptime), there is much more to being a regulatory reporting service than just the underlying technology. One of the reasons that 90 percent of the top 20 global sell-side firms have chosen to work with UnaVista is the ancillary services we offer before, during and after the implementation of a new piece of regulation. For example, ahead of the revised Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (Mifid II), we launched an Accelerator Programme to help firms to prepare their data and train teams months before the final versions of the RTS are available. The Programme gave customers the ability to upload their data sources one by one to test the validations and configurations. This helped many clients be ready well ahead of go-live, including one tier-one investment bank that told us that it knocked four months off its preparation time. The Programme also included access to our leading team of regulatory SMEs and places for their team on our certified training courses. UnaVista will be replicating the Accelerator Programme for the upcoming Securities Financing Transactions Regulation (SFTR).

What are the drivers that you are seeing across the sell side that are pushing firms to adopt the UnaVista platform?

Husler: Many of our sell-side clients have told us that our large user-base of 100,000 globally, across thousands of firms, means that there is a community that they can tap into. We regularly hold events, working groups and webinars where clients get to learn from UnaVista as well as their peers. We also have a client Advancement Programme where we proactively assess the quality of their reporting, provide them with stats on how they are performing against their peers, and highlight common reporting errors. The goal is not only to show them how to improve their reporting but also to give them tools that they can use internally to optimize their reporting. 

Finally, sell-side firms often have multiple regulatory reporting regimes that they need to comply with. It is often easier for them to work with one global provider such as UnaVista that can offer them robust regulatory reporting solutions across all of the different regimes. This allows them to obtain a complete and accurate picture of their reporting in a single place, eliminating the need to build multiple solutions ahead of each new regulation.

What are the firm’s immediate plans with respect to the platform/service? Any new functionality on the horizon? 

Husler: UnaVista is currently assisting firms with the upcoming SFTR, which is due to go live in 2019.  We will be offering a trade repository service for firms to meet their reporting needs, and we will also be offering the Accelerator Programme for firms to help prepare their data and their teams as early as possible. 

Aside from SFTR, UnaVista is also looking at ways we can help clients make the most of the data we hold for them. For example, we have built a transaction analytics platform that uses a firm’s Mifir reported data to provide them with market abuse and surveillance alerts. The regulators use firms’ reported Mifir data to monitor for market abuse, so in conjunction with the London Stock Exchange’s market surveillance team we have built many of the same alerts so that firms can view this for themselves. By simply switching a button, customers can get behavioral and market-abuse alerts based on their own Mifir transaction data.

We are also aiming to provide firms with more anonymized benchmarks on their own reporting data. Using peer-to-peer analysis, firms will be able to build dashboards to ensure they are not falling behind the rest of their peers and the industry on the quality of their reporting.