Finding A Key For Data Quality

It's difficult in the financial services and securities industries, amid flare-ups over fairness of high-frequency trading, to get any cooperative effort for a greater good off the ground, but in one small segment of data management, a modest community is being built.

High data quality eludes many, but post-trade services provider Omgeo, by opening the ability to enrich trading with data from its Omgeo Alert standing settlement instructions (SSI) database through a partnership begun last fall with its parent, the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation, is finding a way to produce "incremental" benefits for brokers through wider use of SSIs, according to Matthew Nelson, executive director of strategy at Omgeo.

Turning the SSI database into the equivalent of an open API (application programming interface), allowing other service providers to enrich data as long as they are approved by a governance committee, builds community, says Nelson.

"The benefits kick in the bigger that community gets," he adds. "Every incremental bit we move the needle up on the size of that community, the more benefits there are for the brokers, who have to deal with their client community on Alert and also with all the manual bespoke methods [being used]."

Allowing Alert SSI trade data to be enriched by other contributors will also fill gaps in asset classes not covered by Omgeo, such as over-the-counter derivatives and foreign exchange. Also, recently, Omgeo and DTCC added an interface allowing global custodians and prime brokers to use the SSI database, bringing more parties to the resource.

Currently, more than 90% of the data in the Alert SSI is compliant with industry best practices standards, according to Nelson. So there appears to be room for Omgeo's conversion of its database to an open, shared platform to enhance the quality of the data it will contain overall. The further expansion of Alert SSI to cover more types of securities and serve more segments of the industry ought to bring it closer to 100% in data quality terms very soon.