Best Reference Data Integration Vendor: Asset Control

The integration of reference data is vital for helping financial firms meet the reporting and data management demands of today’s regulatory environment and to provide easily accessible and quality data for their business users. Asset Control’s efforts to meet these requirements through its breadth of offerings and new capabilities, including its recently launched managed data service Asset Control Platform as a Scalable Service (AC PaSS), make it the winner of this year’s Best Reference Data Integration Vendor award.

Asset Control’s data management solutions provide data integration, cleansing, distribution and discovery services, helping clients address a rapidly changing market driven by increasing volumes, more rigorous demands on quality and cross-platform lineage, and stricter requirements on data management processes.

AC PaSS is a managed service deliverng the functionality of Asset Control’s on-site AC Plus platform, but with the option to source data management operations on a use-case basis—such as revised Markets in Financial Instruments Directive post-trade reporting master data or independent valuations or processes to meet Fundamental Review of the Trading Book reference data requirements. The service appeals to a broader base of buy-side firms and banks that do not need the full scale and features of AC Plus.

AC PaSS includes last-mile integration, and testing against client-side integration and comes with service-level agreements to maintain service quality. In April, Asset Control announced AC PaSS was available in the Oracle Cloud Marketplace. 

“We find a lot of clients have specific use cases for reference data and would like to avoid a complete revamp or overhaul of their infrastructure. Instead, they would like to augment what they already have,” says Martijn Groot, vice president of marketing and strategy at Asset Control. “AC PaSS allows them to do this for one or more use cases at a time.”

The company also launched ACX, a cloud-deployed data analytics, exploration and processing platform. Built on a structured query language Cassandra/Spark technology stack and using open-source components, ACX provides a range of options to access data coming from AC Plus and other data sources. Earlier this year, it launched Operations 360, a dashboard that offers an end-to-end view of data acquisition, derivation, cleansing and distribution through a control layer of these processes. 

“Operation 360 is about tracking and tracing and providing end-users with insight into the status of data management processes at a glance. Users can zoom in on process metrics to identify and remove bottlenecks and optimize data cleansing. Any issues raised will immediately appear in the dashboard and the user can drill down and take corrective actions,” says Groot.

To round off an extremely busy year, Asset Control moved to new ownership in September, with UK-based private equity firm Sovereign Capital Partners investing in the company. 

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