Best Reference Data Newcomer (Vendor or Product): SIX

Significant market changes brought on by regulation have prompted vendors to up their games and offer new services to ensure regulatory requirements can be implemented efficiently. One vendor that has taken helping the industry into its own hands is this year’s winner of the Best Reference Data Newcomer award, SIX.

With regulation creating a need for improved flow of information between the sell side and buy side, SIX last year introduced its Regulatory Hub, which is designed to allow the real-time exchange of product-related data and documents in a standardized way to help firms comply with multiple regulations.

Phil Lynch, head of markets, products and partners at SIX’s financial information business unit, says packaged retail and insurance‑based investment products (Priips) and the revised Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (Mifid II) have created a need for two-way communication to meet transparency and document‑sharing requirements, but the industry was challenged by a lack of digitalization in the supply chain. “Many didn’t know who was distributing their products,” he says, adding: “The infrastructure didn’t exist to connect the buy side and the sell side.”

To help solve the problem and connect the buy side to the sell side, SIX was inspired by services such as Google News, which connects users to different news sources. The key question in the development phase, Lynch says, was “how can we leave the data where it is, but connect distributors to manufacturers and always ensure the data is up to date?”

Since then, SIX has launched its Regulatory Hub—a document exchange portal with normalized and auditable data. The Regulatory Hub is an industry-wide platform, which sets out to facilitate faster flow of information and thus help firms create a strategic infrastructure for dealing with ever-changing regulatory requirements. The launch led the judges to praise SIX for “remaining relevant and expanding its legacy platform to good effect,” and the Regulatory Hub was seen to offer “very good new coverage,” focusing on “an area often ignored in the marketplace.”

Despite starting from scratch last year, the Regulatory Hub already holds 20 million documents, with around a million being added every week since the regulations went live in January. “It’s a platform that will continue to play an exceptional part in what we do,” says Lynch, adding that next year the Regulatory Hub will be expanded from covering Priips, the Financial Market Infrastructure Act and Mifid II to also include Ucits fund data and documentation.

Read more about the IMD/IRD Awards 2018 winners