IMD & IRD Awards 2023: Best reference data managed service—SmartStream Technologies

Overview

The SmartStream Reference Data Utility (RDU) managed service is a collaborative effort with the industry. It offers a cross-referenceable solution that saves time and eliminates the operational burden of sourcing and cleansing reference data from various information providers.

The solution

With the SmartStream RDU managed service, customers can take advantage of a managed service for vendor-sourced reference data, such as fixed income and equities, and exercise control over cross-referenced securities data. The RDU provides a consistent view of reference information across data vendors and offers a normalized set of attributes in addition to raw vendor formats, creating a reliable cross-referenceable solution. It also removes ambiguity from this data, ensuring corporate actions are applied at the start of the trading day, as well as performing extensive data-quality checks.

Secret sauce

By providing clean, consistent, and reliable reference data to financial institutions, the SmartStream RDU managed service can help reduce errors, improve efficiency and reduce the risk of non-compliance. It also enables firms to understand how their data fits together across multiple asset classes, making it a valuable risk management tool. The service allows users to add custom attributes that are not available via vendors, and also covers obscure or complicated exchanges that most vendors do not supply data for. For example, no other managed service provider offers short-selling data to the same depth and breadth.

Recent enhancements

• API suite for quicker access to services and data
• Exchange notification service (ENS), which delivers a normalized view of exchange notifications from more than 100 derivatives exchanges
• SmartStream RDU with SmartStream Air (AI Reconciliations) launched a new solution―Transaction Reporting Reconciliation and Reporting Decision Control―to provide disclosure capabilities for Mifid II compliance

Future objectives

• The onboarding of data from the Nodal Exchange
• Expansion of delivery capability to include Snowflake
• Supporting the necessary data changes to post-Brexit Mifid II data

Why they won

SmartStream’s Reference Data Utility (RDU) wins yet another category in the annual IMD & IRD Awards, this time in the best reference data managed service category. The RDU managed data service is all about collaboration and minimizing the heavy lifting for market participants around the sourcing and managing of reliable, consistent, and clean reference data. To that end, the service delivers vendor-sourced fixed-income and equities reference data, providing uses with greater visibility and control over cross-referenced securities data and freeing them up to focus on higher-value functions.