07:28 PM
GoldenSource Enhances Its Enterprise Data Management Software
GoldenSource Corp. (booth #3109) is introducing this week the eighth release of its enterprise data management software. "We've made a lot of improvements based on market demands and client requests, specifically around the exception management process, as well as on corporate actions notifications scrubbing," relates Sam Weibel, the vendor's VP of investment banking solutions. The company also has enhanced the way the software handles price data, adding user-configurable rules for verifying prices, according to Weibel.
The GoldenSource solution helps firms manage data, including establishing a hierarchy of data vendor sources and creating "golden copies" for indicative data using business rules. Installations of GoldenSource often support data feed consolidation and rationalization. A firm that brings in the same Bloomberg feed to five different areas of the organization, for instance, potentially could reduce its costs by securing an enterprise license to Bloomberg and managing the distribution of data to the five internal groups through GoldenSource.
In other cases, when investment banks or asset management firms merge, they end up with multiple back-office systems and security masters. The GoldenSource solution can help centralize data management and deliver data to downstream systems — such as risk, trading and accounting systems — while eliminating redundancies. Version 8 of GoldenSource's software runs on a J2EE server, rather than the proprietary server the company used previously. Weibel says the software has been ported over to the Eclipse framework and includes more workflow and business process management characteristics. Business analysts and IT configuration staff, he says, now can change rules and workflows without support from GoldenSource staff. Also new in version 8 is the ability to monitor GoldenSource applications from a central IT data monitoring tool, such as IBM's Tivoli.
A new corporate actions feature enables interplay between automated and human decision making, Weibel adds. "Corporate actions data tends to be more subjective and requires more human interaction than regular security and master indicative data," he says. "There may be instances where it is the same event, but from a systemic point of view and an automated rules point of view, it could be interpreted as a different event. So you then take that data, present it to a user, and let them do the research and make the decision on whether it should be classified as one event or multiple events." Handling corporate actions, Weibel notes, involves a certain amount of risk, especially for large custodians. "Even a single error on a dividend with 10 cents' value could cost a firm millions of dollars," he says, asserting that GoldenSource's built-in rules mitigate risk by enforcing quality standards.