Introduction

Accurate and actionable information is a necessary condition to any capital markets activity, whether it means doing a trade, informing an investor, selling a product or complying with regulation around the instrument and transaction lifecycles. The absence of easily accessible, consolidated information has caused enormous problems in reporting and insight into the overall state of the business.

Product proliferation and regulatory demands continuously foster the need for new vendor content and software products. These need to be integrated with existing infrastructures in turn. This is one of the reasons why, if we look at an institution's data architecture from a bird's eye perspective, it typically looks like a maze of applications, databases, reports, data feeds and point to point interfaces. New reports often get bolted onto existing processing, new data feeds are plugged in to feed existing applications and the processing in between more often than not is a mix of legacy systems interspersed with vertical silo applications.

Between the places of origin of financial information such as market makers, research agencies, exchanges and issuing parties and the ultimate users (whether end users or business systems), there typically is a convoluted information supply chain. This supply chain includes different intermediaries between the ultimate source and the point of consumption, including information aggregators, validation, data enrichment and distribution functions.