AFTAs 2018: Best Collaboration Initiative—AxiomSL

AxiomSL wins this year’s AFTA for the best collaboration initiative, a category won last year by SS&C Advent and Maitland. AxiomSL’s data integrity and control initiative, responsible for delivering this year’s win, is designed to help clients comply with Comprehensive Capital Analysis and Review (CCAR) requirements and other complex regulatory mandates that have sprung up in the last few years. 

The company works with its clients by way of a consultation process on how best to approach their implementation of regulations like CCAR. The platform allows clients to compile reports for regulations that require granularity, something that they previously were not required to do. 

Eli Feuer, a vice president and solution architect at AxiomSL, says transparency is a big focus for the company, as it wants to provide its end-users with the ability to point to specific records used for reporting purposes. “A big focus for us is transparency—any change we make is saved forever,” Feuer says. “We’re not a black box so clients can see how data comes in. This transparency makes it easy for institutions to point out which records make up the amounts they have reported. It also helps us focus on end-users because we want them to know how the platform works.” 

Beyond knowing how the platform works, clients also have to deal with the constantly evolving nature of regulations. For the past year, Feuer says, AxiomSL has built new products around new or upcoming rules, as well as introducing new features. One such update is a data lineage function that traces individual records from source to final report. Feuer says clients demanded the ability to map out data to better understand where the data is coming from and trace its ownership. The firm also released an initial product for the new Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC) rule that requires banks with two million or more account deposits to report insurance calculations. The FDIC regulation is not due to come into force until 2020, but the company decided to release a version based on initial rules, which will be updated when more information becomes available. Another update was around rules for single counterparty credit limits, which comes into force this year. 

Feuer says clients are moving past just wanting to comply with rules—they are learning that all this granular data may be useful for business. “After the financial crisis, there was a big focus on regulations. We’re now moving past that and people are thinking about ways to have a sustainable model in the long term to comply with all these new regulations,” he says.