Sell-Side Technology Awards 2020: Best Sell-Side Middle-Office Platform—UnaVista

UnaVista, the London Stock Exchange Group’s (LSEG’s) technology platform, has worked for over a decade to simplify the reporting process for regulated firms and help them adapt to ongoing changes to global reporting obligations. But it is the firm’s continuous technology efforts and its recent push to provide intelligent insights that won it the award for the best sell-side middle-office platform at this year’s Sell-Side Technology Awards. 

Today, the platform provides customizable analytics, advanced graphical charting and real-time processing of reporting data. Regulated firms can develop customized dashboards with real-time trends and alerts. UnaVista uses machine learning to provide intelligent performance analytics of clients’ reporting activities. It also offers peer-to-peer analysis to enable clients to compare their reporting metrics against an anonymized average of their peers—whether that is specific firm types or UnaVista’s entire customer base, which includes over 1,000 regulated firms. “It allows clients to effectively have a full workflow lifecycle around the dataset displayed on the web-based GUI, together with systems and controls like reconciliations built-in,” says Mark Husler, CEO of UnaVista. “It’s really important to the regulators and to clients that firms have good systems and controls to prove that their internal audits and compliance measures are properly executed, and that the data correctly reflects what is sent to the regulators.” 

Clients have access to “import and export in any format” functionality and a configurable user-permissions rules engine, matching and validations. UnaVista also features inbuilt audit trail and compliance workflows, and users can access their reference data connections (Legal Entity Identifiers, International Securities Identification Numbers, and Stock Exchange Daily Official Lists, etc.) via the LSE, as well as plug-in third-party reference data. 

UnaVista can also build bespoke solutions for individual sell-side firms, such as custom-developed matching engines, T2S matching and settlement ETL, reconciliation, and trade repositories, such as for SIX and Maroclear. Clients can additionally connect with regulators through UnaVista’s communication channels. The regulatory platform is also linked to the LSEG, offering connectivity to other markets, technology providers, regulators, trade repositories and data providers.

UnaVista is rolling out a series of reporting analytics that cover performance data and feature enhanced peer-to-peer analytics and market abuse detection functionality.