Buy-Side Technology Awards 2016: Winners' Circle—Fidessa
Fidessa executive discusses how its maintained success.
What separates Fidessa Sentinel from other compliance products in the space?
Richard Hooke, buy-side product director, Fidessa: Sentinel was designed from its inception to be a standalone, flexible and extensible compliance platform. These fundamental tenets, coupled with a relentless investment in the product, have enabled Sentinel to endure the test of many years and to win multiple awards.
Being a standalone, independent application means that it is not shackled by the constraints imposed by being subjugated within a larger suite of systems. This means that it has 100 percent of its focus on compliance. It also means that it has extensive integration functionality that enables its superior compliance capabilities to be woven seamlessly into the diverse range of infrastructure seen within the industry. Sentinel allows institutions to develop a compliance framework that is always fully aligned to the dynamics of the business, rather than acting as a constraint to them. Sentinel’s independence also means that it has concentrated on allowing the customers to define the data, rules and analytics that power the compliance function. This flexibility has more than stood the test of time and means that customers can respond to new mandates and regulations quickly and simply.
We never have and never will stand still. We have invested constantly in expanding and developing Sentinel, driven by the needs of our customers and the market.
What enhancements have been made to Sentinel over the past 12 months? What were the driving factors behind them?
Hooke: The drivers we see in the market are the increasing demands of regulation, complexity, scale and transparency, combined with the continued focus on reducing cost. We work closely with our customers through a combination of direct meetings and our user group to discuss these trends and to feed into our product strategy. Last year we focused on increasing the efficiency of some key business processes for our customers by streamlining the user’s workload and making onboarding new funds and mandates faster and more accurate with the addition of account cloning and bulk maintenance of rules.
We also expanded the capability of the Trading Compliance functionality we introduced 18 months ago. This was partly driven by the new US Department of Labor regulations, which Sentinel Trading Compliance supports by storing transaction-level data, including commission, and evaluating trading charges on a per-transaction basis, or aggregate by broker, account or other attributes, in real time (pre-trade) or on a historical perspective.
We have continued to invest in performance in order to maintain our position as the fastest compliance system and to keep ahead of the increasing use that our customers are making of Sentinel with key gains, notably: Post-trade processing now runs 45 percent faster; front-end searches for large sets of incidents complete 45 percent faster; and reference data loads five times faster.
In what areas are buy-side firms’ compliance programs most often lacking? How can Sentinel help them?
Hooke: Compliance, like many operational areas of investment firms, is constantly trying to do more with fewer resources. The regulatory burden is increasing, together with the complexity of the markets and the sophistication of the trading and portfolio activity. All this feeds into a compliance process that is constrained in terms of resourcing. Sentinel helps by providing automated evaluation of rules, a robust workflow and the tools to enable the compliance teams to efficiently research potential compliance breaches, and to communicate this in detail to the stakeholders, be they senior management, clients or regulators.
What future enhancements do you have planned for Sentinel over the next 12 months?
Hooke: One of the strongest themes to emerge from our recent user meeting in New York is “event risk”—this is assessing, in advance, the compliance implications associated with a market or political event, such as a potential credit downgrade or an event such as Brexit. Many firms obviously prepare for such situations, but this has historically been in the area of performance, hedging and risk. Increasingly, however, firms want to see the impact that an event might have on their compliance situation as this may affect their hedging scenarios or require a broader adjustment of their portfolios in response to an event. Providing support for this style of testing is an area of interest for us next year.
Only users who have a paid subscription or are part of a corporate subscription are able to print or copy content.
To access these options, along with all other subscription benefits, please contact info@waterstechnology.com or view our subscription options here: http://subscriptions.waterstechnology.com/subscribe
You are currently unable to print this content. Please contact info@waterstechnology.com to find out more.
You are currently unable to copy this content. Please contact info@waterstechnology.com to find out more.
Copyright Infopro Digital Limited. All rights reserved.
You may share this content using our article tools. Printing this content is for the sole use of the Authorised User (named subscriber), as outlined in our terms and conditions - https://www.infopro-insight.com/terms-conditions/insight-subscriptions/
If you would like to purchase additional rights please email info@waterstechnology.com
Copyright Infopro Digital Limited. All rights reserved.
You may share this content using our article tools. Copying this content is for the sole use of the Authorised User (named subscriber), as outlined in our terms and conditions - https://www.infopro-insight.com/terms-conditions/insight-subscriptions/
If you would like to purchase additional rights please email info@waterstechnology.com
More on Awards & Rankings
Witad Awards 2024: Rising star (vendor) – data, engineering & product development—Roberta Bill, SmartStream Technologies
Roberta Bill, product manager at SmartStream Technologies, wins rising star (vendor) – data, engineering & product development, in the 2024 Women in Technology and Data Awards.
Witad Awards 2024: Technology leader of the year (end-user)—Sejal Shah, BNP Paribas India Services
Sejal Shah, director and head of Global Markets IT BNP Paribas India Services, wins technology leader of the year (end-user) in the 2024 Women in Technology and Data Awards.
Witad Awards 2024: Reference data professional of the year (end-user)—Ludmilla Morgunova, BNP Paribas
Ludmilla Morgunova, Java developer on BNP Paribas’ Referential Data Platform, wins reference data professional of the year (end-user) in the 2024 Women in Technology and Data Awards.
Witad Awards 2024: Vendor professional of the year (trading and risk)—Mina Wallace, SS&C Algorithmics
Mina Wallace, general manager and senior vice president of the risk management business unit at SS&C Algorithmics, wins the vendor professional of the year (trading and risk) in the 2024 Women in Technology and Data Awards.
Witad Awards 2024: Above and beyond award (vendor)—Susan Bennett, Tradeweb
Susan Bennett, managing director, global head of product marketing at Tradeweb, wins the above and beyond award (vendor) in the 2024 Women in Technology and Data Awards.
Women in Technology & Data Awards 2024: All the winners and why they won
WatersTechnology honored the winners of the 36 categories in the 2024 Women in Technology & Data Awards, who were announced at a sit-down lunch in London on International Women's Day on March 8.
AFTAs 2023: Best new technology introduced over the last 12 months (data & data services)—SS&C Aloha
Northern Trust: Improving transparency across the asset servicing market
Northern Trust won three categories in the 2023 American Financial Technology Awards. Paul d’Ouville, global head of technology solutions and servicing at Northern Trust, discusses his firm’s fourth consecutive win in the Best reporting initiative…
Most read
- Women in Technology & Data Awards 2024: All the winners and why they won
- Witad Awards 2024: Above and beyond award (vendor)—Susan Bennett, Tradeweb
- Dark horse: Deutsche Börse building dark pool