ING Group Enters Reference Data Management Service Agreement With Capco

Capco will enter into a seven year agreement with ING Group, whereby Capco Reference Data Services (CRDS) will acquire ING's Security Master File (SMF) platform and will in turn provide ING with managed reference data services. CRDS will provide a managed securities and market reference data service and platform that covers all asset classes and all data types. As a result of the agreement, ING expects to achieve immediate cost reductions and operational benefits.

"We chose to work with CRDS as they are recognized for their deep industry expertise and capacity to deliver," said Erik Dralans, executive, ING Group, in a release. "Clean reference data is critical to our operations, and we chose to entrust our data to CRDS because they have proven that they understand our business and have the skills to optimally manage reference data."

CRDS will integrate ING's proprietary reference data technology solution and coverage within its existing platform. As a result, CRDS will be able to offer a full range of traded and OTC asset classes— fixed income, global equities, derivatives, money markets and OTC instruments— and all data types, such as counterparty, legal entity hierarchy, descriptive data, pricing and corporate actions.

With this arrangement, CRDS now has the ability to provide new and existing clients with security master technology (CRDS Container) that allows for integration between the client's applications that consume the data and CRDS services. The Container is based on ING's security master platform that has been designed to specifically address the data distribution requirements for downstream applications by allowing users to subscribe to those securities that are of interest, their selected attributes and their preferred data source.

ING joins 30 other top-tier global financial institutions as clients of CRDS' managed reference and market data services.

Wombat Releases Feed Handler for Bloomberg B-Pipe

Wombat Financial Software has added a feed handler for Bloomberg's B-Pipe data feed to its market data distribution system, the Wombat Platform. Customers can now deploy Wombat's feed handler for this real-time data feed to integrate it with their own applications using the Wombat Platform as well as other widely used market data platforms.

Wombat began development of this product in March 2005. It is currently engaged in integration testing with multiple clients in the Europe and the U.S. Wombat's feed handler products function on a modular architecture, which allows Wombat to deploy each new feed handler across multiple market data platforms at once. The B-Pipe handler, for example, is currently being implemented with the Wombat Platform and with two other commonly used market data systems. Wombat feed handlers integrate with each platform's data entitlements tools, allowing for necessary access control and reporting.

Reg NMS in the U.S. and MiFID in Europe both stipulate that broker-dealers must provide evidence of "best execution" for their customers. The availability of a data service such as B-Pipe allows customers to implement vendor-level resiliency, switching from one to the other in the case of a delivery failure.

Volante Is First SWIFT Certified Solution to Run on SpikeSource

Volante Technologies, a provider of platform independent data management solutions, has configured and optimized its products for use with SpikeSource Spike Stacks. Volante data management products, which run in J2EE and .NET environments, support a variety of solutions used by the financial services industry including payments, corporate actions, market data and trade processing. By working with SpikeSource, Volante offers customers solutions that are thoroughly tested and certified with all of the open source infrastructure required to run in mission critical environments.

SpikeSource provides Volante with Spike Stacks including Java, Apache and MySQL components that are guaranteed to work with Volante solutions. This enables reliable and lower cost solutions for financial services based on business-ready open source infrastructure, with end-to-end testing and a single point of support.

"Business savvy professionals in financial services do not have to think twice about open source products now. By running a SWIFT certified solution on an open source stack fully supported by SpikeSource, customers are assured of a reliable and risk free offering." said Vijay Oddiraju, CEO of Volante, in a release. "Volante is committed to providing the flexibility for our customers to choose their platform, open source being one of them."