Cicada has announced that it is employing its Cicada Composer data management technology to offer solutions for MiFID compliance requirements, including the ability to demonstrate best execution on client transactions.
Under the sweeping Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID), participants in the European financial markets are faced with the need to modify technology and business processes to meet new standards within a range of functions, including best execution, client classification, pre- and post-trade transparency, transaction reporting and internal controls.
The functionality and features inherent in Cicada Composer offer a practical, low cost, fast-to-implement solution that addresses these and other MiFID-related data challenges. It can be easily configured to use business rules, controls and processes each individual firm employs in its MiFID compliance approach.
The Cicada MiFID solution is designed to facilitate a single data store that permits a compliance department to implement and maintain an unlimited number of best execution rules. The rules, which can be created without the assistance of development staff, are used to monitor and interact with sales and trading in real-time.
All interventions and transaction reviews initiated by the user-defined rules are self-documenting, so that all rules, their application and any resulting investigation or remediation actions are easily audited in the future.
Cicada believes that it is essential for firms to employ configurable, flexible technology that will support the requirements now, while allowing for the inevitable changes to come as the regulations and requirements evolve.
Compliance with best execution standards, for example, requires a technology platform that can process great amounts of price data, collect and analyze a wide range of contextual information, document processes and actions, and establish a rules-based structure that will adapt to changes in the requirements as they evolve.
"The native flexibility, functionality and rules-driven framework already present in Composer make it an effective solution for meeting many of the data-centric compliance requirements brought about by MiFID,D," said Hubert Holmes, Executive VP. "Although we developed Composer long before MiFID became a factor, the functionality and tools built into the platform have turned out to be essential for compliance with so many aspects of the Directive."
Cicada Composer is available in a range of configurations to meet clients' business process and data management requirements driven by MiFID compliance. Deployable on a variety of hardware and operating systems, it can also meet each client's needs in regard to latency, cost of operation and disaster recovery.