Patni Enters Ref Data Space

Business process outsourcing company Patni Computer Systems is entering the financial data management market, introducing an end-to-end managed reference data service, officials tell Inside Reference Data.

Patni has developed a nine-step reference data management offering to help clients improve efficiencies in the back office. Boston-based Fred Cohen, group vice president and global head of Patni's Capital Markets and Investment Banking Practice, says: "This is our first foray into reference data."

Prior to launching the offering, Patni completed a survey of 52 institutions, and results showed that more than 90% of firms are dissatisfied with reference data and data governance in general. After doing the research, which identified reference data as an area where there was a need for improvement, the company decided to create a new service.

The nine steps of the company's new managed service offering include: reference and data rationalization, enterprise data architecture assessment, indexing and normalization of securities data, automated data cleansing, manual data cleansing support, corporate actions processing, new securities set-up, enterprise reference data distribution, and reference data efficiency dashboards for monitoring data usage across the organization.

Patni works with other vendors, such as enterprise data management software providers, buys the necessary software and hardware to support the processes, and manages the data within the client's organization. "None of the data leaves their environment," says Cohen.

The entire service is aimed at reducing firms' data management operational costs by 30-40% on an annual basis, starting from the first full year the service is live. Still, clients can also pick and choose from the nine components. Cohen says each component can be implemented and wrapped around a client's existing system.

The first component for reference and data rationalization, dubbed Radar, can be used on its own, for example, to establish how data is being consumed across the organization. This is a one-time engagement, assessing vendor feeds and analyzing distribution systems. "It will get you a road map of your vendor data," he says, explaining that Radar looks at how reference data is manipulated, passed from program to program and used by each program.