Best Managed Service for Reference Data: Broadridge Financial Solutions

In recent times, there has been a decline in appetite for large-scale, on-site technology implementations, and vendors have released a range of managed services to clean and process reference data in response. The winner of this year’s Best Managed Service for Reference Data award is Broadridge Financial Solutions—a long-established player in the field—which offers a combination of stand-out technology and operations services for clients. 

Broadridge brings together a full suite of managed data services (BMDS) for buy- and sell-side clients spanning the acquisition, cleansing, consolidation, storage and distribution. BMDS encompasses both Broadridge’s technology offerings and the operational processes to support them, including inbound and outbound feed setup and monitoring, reconciliations, quality management, exception processing, remediation and reporting. 

“With the increase in regulatory demands for data transparency and accuracy, and the need to be much more efficient to be continually competitive in the marketplace, reference data needs to be combined in different ways—sometimes with longer histories—and packaged and processed quickly. By outsourcing to us the pain points of aggregating, cleansing, transforming and storing that data, clients are able to avoid the high costs and potential risks associated with these activities and focus their resources on business-differentiated activities,” says Brian Crowley, managing director and general manager, Broadridge Investment Management.

The company’s componentized services allow clients to target specific data management functions, and its service model is tied to service-level agreements and the type and volume of activities performed on behalf of clients, which boosts its appeal to a wider client base.

Ramprasad Sandilya, vice president, strategic solutions at Broadridge, says clients’ business cases have expanded beyond reduction in total cost of ownership to include the mutualization of technology and innovation costs, quicker time to market when expanding services across asset classes, currencies and geographies, and the ability to scale operations with a predictable increase in costs. 

Over the past year Broadridge has made a number of enhancements to its offering. For example, it has continued to improve its browser-based exception management dashboard and reporting workflow management system, giving clients greater transparency into the state of their data and the ability to interact in the process of cleansing and mastering their data.

“Clients can opt to be hands-off and have BMDS manage and deliver their data, but they can also choose to interact with the data, by managing and manipulating the validations and rules,” says Crowley. He adds that Broadridge will continue to focus on extending the number of market data vendors it can receive data from. 

Read more about the Inside Market Data & Inside Reference Data Awards 2019 winners