Financial Data Management “Ops360” style: the Alveo data management principles.
No industry is as data hungry as the financial services sector. At Alveo, we believe data is there to be used. Within legal boundaries, licensing permissions and sensitivity constraints, data should flow uninterruptedly through an organization. But first and foremost, data should be easily onboarded, verified, used as input for new data creation and be linked to data from other internal and external data sources to create new insights.
Alveo’s Ops360 is a web-based data operations solution offering full control over the data acquisition, mastering and data discovery process. It democratizes access to data, maximizes the mileage firms get out of their data assets and leads to new insights by cross-referencing and connecting different internal and external data sets. Ops 360’s capabilities are summarized in the schematic below.
Ops360 dynamically sources the required market data and reference data on financial instruments and also covers issuer, listing, corporate actions and ESG content. It provides users with intuitive access to validated data sets with full lineage capabilities to research anomalies and answer inquiries from users, auditors, or regulators. Ops360 provides a bird’s eye view of data flows, from acquisition through mastering and enrichment through to distribution. Starting with an overview dashboard, users can drill down into a historical overview of processes, pick a time slice, and zoom in on any date range.
When we abstract from the wide array of power tools Ops360 contains to address different use cases, we can see several overarching design principles at work that together sum up Alveo’s view of the world – or in any case that of data management. We’ve come to 12 principles that we have collectively titled “the data dozen”. In this eBook, you will find a brief description of each of these together with an Ops360 screenshot to illustrate the principle.
The overall philosophy of Ops360 is to bring the data to the people. No need for heavy tooling, coding, or IT skills. No steep learning curves. Just bring your curiosity, experience, and your intuition to discover Ops360. The data awaits.
1 Easily find what you need
Ideally, the data you need should come looking for you. However, sometimes it feels that you have to mount an expedition to go and find the data you need. Ops360 helps you to easily access the data you need and provides the stepping stones to discover related content. It links different objects together so you can jump from issuers to issued products and different listings. Similarly, we expose the links from underlying to derivative products, and from securities and entities to associated corporate actions. Within the Ops360 browser, you will easily find your way around in the data landscape.
Ops 360 provides easy access to quality-proven data to anyone in the organization. Simply select your data model or data sources, select your asset classes, and easily create queries. Selecting an individual instrument allows you to drill down into its terms and conditions or explore its price history.
Via configurable data views, Ops360 users control how they want to interact with the data and can easily configure combinations of data sets, regions, roles, processes, and rules. The Ops 360user interface dynamically reflects these configurations.
2 From Bird’s eye view to deep data depth
Alveo’s provides the complete data models of the many data sources it supports out of the box as well as a comprehensive capital markets data model for pricing and reference data. Ops360 also tracks contextual data and a full audit trail and lineage, as well as quality markers and permissions so you can judge whether a data set is fit for purpose. Bitemporality allows you to see data with an “as of” data, i.e., at a certain moment in time.
Ops360 shows you data on different levels: from dashboards showing summary statistics to all the detail on all the attributes that describe specific financial products. From dashboard to detail, you can dive as deep as needed.
Data models or data dictionaries can range from a few fields to thousands of fields to model all terms and conditions of complex structured products. Alveo’s data modelling ranges from standard datatypes to complex structures and includes derived fields (e.g., volatility, beta, or gamma) and risk factors such as curves and surfaces.
3 Uncompromising transparency
Where is my data? When can I expect it? Is everything delivered on time? How many exceptions did we encounter? What kind of exceptions? Are any of the input sources missing or incomplete? What data sets went into a preparation process? Ops360 allows you to answer all of these questions.
When it comes to data operations in financial services, you cannot afford to be 50%, 90% or even 99% transparent. There are no shades of grey here. Ops360 always provides you with a real-time, bird’s eye view of the status of your data deliverables. It gives you an overview of all data that is being loaded, processed and distributed.
Other than the status of data sourcing, preparation, and delivery processes, Ops360 provides insight into consumption metrics (who uses what) and in data quality metrics. This includes overviews of specific data quality issues, for example broken down per source, delivery, or asset class. This helps to continuously improve and fine-tune data quality management and track against SLAs.
4 Track and trace. Always.
Ops360’s transparency goes deeper than just dashboards. The Ops360 data lineage provides the ability to explain every decision and every data point used in a business process.
Regulators increasingly want you to keep track of the provenance of any data feeding into internal risk models or portfolio valuation. Regulatory reporting requirements frequently change and –generally speaking – the trend is towards more and more detail as well as context.
Having a full view of data flows and lineage is a necessary precondition for any change in your application landscape, on board a new report or business process. The devil is in the detail and a comprehensive view also dramatically lowers the cost of change. A data lineage view not only helps you with good data governance, but it also shows you the impact of any change you want upstream or downstream.
Ops360 provides full transparency and control of user roles and permissions. It also allows you to easily set up the data preparation and verification processes that need to run on the datasets through configurable business process management.
5 Onboarding new data should be as easy as pie
Optimizing data sourcing is an important part of overall data management. Whether sourcing data piecemeal via per security products, in bulk deliveries or via streaming platforms, it pays to be able to easily interact with the data suppliers. Alveo provides a wide library of prebuilt integrations with commonly used financial data providers.
Within Ops 360’s Select view, user scan create outgoing data requests and optimize data usage by preventing redundant sourcing. The data collection services that run behind the Select screen within Ops360 make sure you can get new data into production fast.
New data requests are easily set up and configured. Simply select the retrieval method, download category and elapsed time. Templates show all preconfigured attributes and instruments loaded for a request. You can drill down to see the individual tags for a specific vendor and dropdowns by asset class help you get started sourcing data quickly. Properties of requests can be configured to run ad-hoc or be scheduled at any given frequency.
6 Data is all around
Putting your data to work and ensuring you get the most mileage out of it is one of Ops360’s guiding principles. This covers not just the acquisition, cross-referencing, quality control and derivation of data, but also offering you the most effective ways of disseminating this information to your stakeholders.
Ops360 gets the data to where it needs to be – fast. Within Ops360, you can shape the distribution format and select the channel. The contents of distributions are shaped through definitions of lists of interest and, for example, which attributes to include in which channel. Ops360 helps you manage the complex logistics of last-mile integration and gets the data into the arteries as well as the capillaries of an organization.
Anchoring data into different business processes it facilitated through direct access to the data via the end-user browsing, via APIs and through streaming data (Kafka) real-time or providing scheduled, curated data sets into business applications, reports, or data lakes. You can combine Ops360 with Alveo’s data warehouse Alpha or integrate with third-party data warehouses such as Snowflake or Redshift.
7 Data begets more data
Combining the cleansed and aggregated input data with Ops360’s data derivation capabilities helps you enrich your data or create proprietary new data. Whether setting up risk factors, your own ESG or credit ratings, custom benchmarks and indices or other custom baskets, with Ops360 you will build on a solid foundation.
Ops360 provides integration with financial libraries such as Quantlib and commonly used languages such as Python and you will find it easy to configure the derivations you need exactly as per your requirements. Through time series arithmetic you add or subtract, triangulate, scale or do currency conversions.
In every calculation you can
- Control which sources are used for calculations. For example, control which bonds to go into a bond curve calculation
- Put the calculation on top of any source or composite data set
- Shape the output structure such as defining the set of tenor points you need in a curve
- Control parameters such as interpolation, fitting methods and day count conventions
- Set validation rules on the results, for example to check unusual shapes or movements
You can assign rules by object(instruments, indices, risk factors) or on a per attribute basis. The rule catalogue provides the complete inventory including what Alveo provides out of the box.
8 Linking data sets increases value
Ops360 makes data sets and their associated contextual information easily discoverable and accessible. It creates an environment in which business users can self-serve and get the data they need, where they need it. It provides capabilities to link different datasets and gain new insights and it liberates data from the constraints of legacy solutions and data warehouses.
Alveo’s matching engine links different data sets. Matching can relate to either different sources relating to the same object or different objects. In both cases, linking data sources leads to valuable cross-pollination between datasets. The matching engine cross-references different symbologies and common security or entity identifiers. It links derivatives to their underlying products, different listings to the primary security, securities to their issuers and corporate actions to financial products or companies.
Data sources are cross-referenced and represented in Alveo’s industry data model. This data model provides a comprehensive view of the industry’s market and reference data requirements and acts as a common yardstick. It covers thousands of fields and the total of rules that maps content into the data model runs into the hundreds of thousands.
Simply put: Alveo’s matching tool does the legwork to allow the creation of an easily navigable universe of financial objects. Linking different data sets creates network effects and increases the value of individual data sets.
9 Data quality comes left, right and center
At Alveo, we are fanatical about data quality and data quality management is engrained into every step of Ops360’s data management process. Having a good understanding of different quality aspects is critical to understand whether the data used is fit for purpose. Data quality has different aspects including missing fields, unexpected values, anomalies between sources, deviations versus a benchmark or reference product, timeliness of delivery, completeness, and accuracy.
After data sourcing and cross-referencing, data can be prepared and signed-off for usage downstream. Ops360’s workflow provides an overview of anomalies and context as to why an alert was raised. A dropdown menu allows you to zoom in on suspect data items to get the full context. This includes price history and the impact of corporate actions. Issues can be accepted, corrected and commented on.
Ops360’s data quality dashboard provides you an overview of which rules are fired, what sources contribute what and where processes can be improved. Let the humans focus on the exceptions –we automate the rest.
10 BYOBP!
Bring your own business process! Nobody understands your data requirements better than you. That’s why we say “bring your own business process” and have made it straightforward to set up data cleansing workflows. Using Ops360’s no-code, business process design capabilities you bring your firm’s data DNA to Ops360’s capabilities.
You always have your hands on the wheel and can set-up different data management processes that involve multistep workflows that include different roles whether for data cleansing, onboarding of new instruments or the shaping of new data deliveries.
Ops360 understands that your specific processes differ and that data operations are at the service of the business. Depending on the data domain, regulatory parameters, content licensing restrictions as well as your internal processes, the ways in which you onboard new data sets, resolve anomalies, and manage change differ.
11 Sharing is caring!
No piece of data should be an island. At Alveo, we believe silos are for grain, not for data. Scheduled distributions and browser access aside, programmatic access is a requirement for close-knit integration and directly integrate the data universe, or also contribute new data.
One of the biggest challenges of data management is to prevent data being sourced multiple times – leading to unnecessary direct cost but even larger direct cost as multiple streams of the same data lead to higher infrastructure cost and uncertainty as to which repository to use. With Ops360, you can streamline the sourcing and quality-proofing of your data.
Within the constraints of permission management and content licensing, we believe data should be as easily accessible as possible. Other than the end-user data access and integration with end user tools such as Excel, we provide APIs that put the data processed through Ops360 at the heart of your ecosystem.
Whether integrating with cloud DWH such as Snowflake, integration with external libraries and programming languages, BI solutions, or integration with external applications, we cater to different ways of programmatically accessing the data including a REST API and a FAST API with in-memory caching.
12 Maintain a line of sight
Data for all! Metering data distribution and consumption provides insight in where the data goes and who uses it. It helps you track whether you use all the data you bought and monitors that you stay within the parameters of any content licensing arrangements. It helps you spot possible overuse but also detects underuse of data or identify data sets that are never used.
Through its data metering, Ops360 will optimize your operational effectiveness and you can be notified through Ops360 alerts within the solution, through email notifications or other channels. It can help organize data consumption by group or department or application. It helps prepare for change by providing an overview of data usage for impact assessment. It makes it easy to explain the data input behind a client report or an internal risk model.
Using consumption metrics can improve operational efficiency. Consumption metering also helps you with overall cost management, maximize the ROI of your data and internal cost allocation.