A securities data warehousing system introduced by ABN Amro for dealing room risk management purposes four years ago is to be rolled out to other deaprtments within the bank. The Market and Static Data Service package supplied to the bank by local vendor Asset Control (www.asset-control.com) is being extended to more than 10,000 users worldwide.
David Forster, ABN Amro senior vice president, comments: "When the M&SDS project was first envisioned in 1996, the bank was seeking a centralised, networked data architecture that would address the immediate needs of the risk control division, yet offer the scalability and extensibility to improve the quality and consistency of securities data throughout the bank. This project has met our expectations for the initial phases, and we are currently extending the value of M&SDS to a growing number of users, applications and business initiatives."
The Asset Control data management platform gathers, cleanses and validates market data, static reference data, and corporate action data from third-party vendors and internal systems, integrating all of them into a single consolidated framework of times-series and relational database storage. At ABN Amro, the system currently tracks 4 million instruments, making M&SDS one of the largest repositories ever assembled by an investment bank. The product uses workflow capabilities to create user- or application-specific information and react to programmed triggers or limits.
The system is currently being employed by hundreds of users and applications for customer clearing, global consolidation, revaluation and e-commerce. As M&SDS is extended globally as well as across various lines of business, the bank estimates that more than 10,000 individuals and 1,000 applications will be using the data over the next year or two