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The data conundrum
This article first appeared in:
financial-i
December 2004
Download whole article (PDF)As more trades are executed electronically, regulators demand higher levels of data capture and traders seek competitive advantage, database technologies are trying to keep up with the need for speed.
A typical investment bank has a plethora of data – both structured and unstructured – scattered across the enterprise. There are data feeds from exchanges, third party vendors such as Reuters, Bloomberg and Thomson and internal data feeds from historical databases containing reference or transaction data. “Trading increasingly requires more and more data, yet many institutions do not have the necessary infrastructure in place to manage it successfully,” observes Brian Sentance, commercial director, Xenomorph, a provider of enterprise-wide data management and analysis solutions. Or as one vendor puts it, banks are literally ‘choking’ on data, and as more trades are conducted electronically the amount of data banks have to contend with is showing no signs of abating. Added to that is the increasing regulatory imperative to not only store historical data but to be able to detect fraud or transactions that exceed acceptable risk limits before they turn into catastrophic events.
© 2004 financial-i
All rights reserved. Used by permission.
First published in December 2004