Market data firm Cicada has launched a new subsidiary, Cicada Risk, to offer reference data cleansing services for risk management applications.
Cicada Risk will utilise the company's flagship Composer data management and distribution technology to provide banks, insurance companies and money managers with clean, validated source data for their risk applications.
The solutions will be tailored to clients' data requirements and can be offered inhouse at the client site or as fully outsourced infrastructures residing in Cicada-managed data centers.
The quality of company reference data has been identified as a key stumbling block to straight-trhough processing at financial instutions. Both Reuters and CapCo, through their Synetix joint venture, and Netherlands-based data cleansing outfit Asset Control have recently developed reference data bureau services.
Hubert Holmes, President of Cicada Risk, comments: "Clean, high quality reference data is obviously critical to producing accurate results from high value applications such as risk management, and no data source is perfect. Intervention is necessary, but developing the proper resources and infrastructure to ensure clean data is not easy. Firms often find that trying to piece together the technology solution and data quality processes internally is not only costly, but also puts an organisational strain on existing resources."