Witad Awards 2020: Technology Innovator of the Year (End User)—Saritha Parchuri, Bank of America

The consolidated audit trail (CAT) regulation has presented data challenges to broker-dealers, which have to invest in new technology and controls. Bank of America is preparing to leverage a data warehouse for the CAT, which already powers reporting under Finra’s Order Audit Trail System. The solution has come out of transformation of the bank’s equities business, which has been driven by Saritha Parchuri.

Parchuri is the CIO of the bank’s Equities Data and Analytics Technology. She has worked to transform this business into a more data- and analytics-driven one, keeping a global team of 100 engineers focused on getting data right. Parchuri’s initiative is called DNA, for Data aNd Analytics, and has resulted in a new end-to-end processing architecture for data. DNA already processes over 10 billion messages a day.  

DNA began with the build-out of a real-time streaming data backbone based on a data dictionary and unified messaging bus designed to enforce data quality and completed throughout the trade lifecycle. This data contract was adopted across every trading platform in BofA’s equities business, ensuring that all the trading desks and their systems speak the same language. This singular view of trading activity enables the aggregation of trade data to provide insight into sales and trading activity across the organization, which was not possible before. And this is what will be leveraged for CAT reporting.

The data dictionary was designed with a wide scope to support multiple use-cases, all while being powered by a single view of data, eliminating discrepancies between reports and reducing the need to reconcile between multiple data sources.

Parchuri’s rollout of DNA also simplified the application landscape: Hundreds of proprietary point-to-point data feeds are being untangled into a single, unified feed covering multiple use-cases. Aging middleware is being retired and replaced with a high-performance universal bus adopted by all trading systems, while legacy databases are being consolidated into a single data warehouse. This simplification has resulted in quicker turnaround time for new development, while lowering the total cost of ownership.

Parchuri is now rolling out DNA—which has been awarded two US patents—to other areas of BofA’s Markets, including foreign exchange, futures and wealth management. It is being used for reporting under various regulatory regimes in Europe and Asia-Pacific, and for extended uses in surveillance reporting, business alerting and trading analytics.