SAN MATEO, Calif., June 28, 2017 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Arcadia Data, provider of the first native visual analytics software for big data, today announced the Taurus Initiative to address the multidimensional challenges of regulatory compliance. By working with subject matter experts, including former regulators and Greenwich Associates, the Taurus Initiative will help the financial industry accelerate robust and defensible compliance programs. Arcadia Data brings technology to an ecosystem of data providers and platform vendors to deliver fit-for-purpose solutions that drive regulatory compliance and bring transparency to institutional and systemic risk.
Regulatory compliance in the financial services industry is experiencing a paradigm shift from data monitoring and reporting to dynamic modeling, evaluation, remediation, and business adaptation. A data-driven regulatory compliance program must bring clarity to complex processes by allowing subject matter experts across the enterprise (front office, middle office, back office, and senior management) to paint a dynamic and interactive picture across billions of rows of structured, unstructured, real-time, and historical data that is relevant to their line of business. The burden of proof to regulators for strong and tested processes remains a challenge, considering:
- Capitalization requirements demand a broad and thorough evaluation of models. These models must be proven against real transaction data that is both sufficient in volume and adequate in quality;
- Recordkeeping rules require the trade lifecycle of complicated derivative trades to be reconstructed within 72 hours of a regulator’s request, inclusive of chat, voice, emails, trade execution, and post trade events.
Putting Alternative Data to Use through Collaboration
As part of the Taurus Initiative, Arcadia Data not only addresses the technical challenges of calculation efficiency, data volume, and data variety, but also considers cross organizational collaboration as a core component to solving challenges frequently encountered by financial services professionals. A common theme across the financial services regulatory and compliance landscape is to prove a robust and defensible process to regulators. To do that, large volumes and many types of data, some of which are considered new or alternative to the industry, are needed.
Arcadia Data is sponsoring research with Greenwich Associates to bring intelligence to market on how hedge fund traders, chief investment officers, chief data officers, portfolio managers, and analysts are effectively using alternative data, such as weather or social media data. “We expect to learn more about how portfolio managers use new types of data and how the front office view alternative data sources as inputs to the risk management process,” says Kevin McPartland Head of Market Structure & Technology Research at Greenwich Associates. Research results will be available later this year.
In addition, Arcadia Data has engaged Kenneth A. Goodwin Jr., a former central banker (NY Fed and Bank of Japan) and adjunct professor of international trade and corporate ethics, to articulate core regulatory challenges and how native visual analytics can be used to address them. “Ensuring data integrity should be the primary focus of compliance and risk management programs. The discussions around data aggregation and reporting are misguided. The enterprise risk of a firm is questionable when underlying businesses aggregate data for their own purposes and then the results don’t sync up,” said Goodwin. “The Arcadia Data data-native architecture for visual analysis is unique and will help ensure data integrity across the enterprise by eliminating the data transformations that lead to data inconsistency.”
“Granular First” Provides Faster, Deeper Insights for Compliance
This initiative is about developing the toolsets that help accelerate compliance, and immediate access to granular details is a key capability. “Arcadia Data takes a ‘granular first’ approach, which is crucial in maintaining fidelity of the underlying data, but it also provides cost savings opportunities,” said Paul Lashmet, practice lead for financial services at Arcadia Data. “Financial markets and the institutions which operate within them require full transparency on risk, collaboratively across the entire ecosystem. The Taurus Initiative provides a roadmap on how to leverage the Arcadia Data visual analytics engine, which runs directly where the data resides at the most granular level. This allows teams to visualize financial models at a macro and micro level on the same data application in real-time. Best of all, the subject matter experts can drive and optimize the regulatory process and collaborate with their peers.”
“I can't stress enough the importance of timely analytics based on granular financial data that reveal how concentrations of risk are intertwined with the network of obligations between financial firms," says Dr. Allan Mendelowitz, the former chairman of the Federal Housing Finance Committee and current president of the ACTUS Financial Research Foundation. "Risk models, by themselves, do not provide enough information to risk officers and their boards to appreciate the implications of trading strategies across the enterprise. As an alternative, Arcadia Data's granular-first approach, when coupled with the contract level cash flows generated by the ACTUS financial contract standard, enable a deeper understanding of the risks across the firm."
With customers including Nordea Bank, one of Europe’s largest banks, and Royal Bank of Canada, a Canadian multinational financial services company and the largest bank in Canada, Arcadia Data enables financial services organizations to visualize data sets at scale in a fully secured environment, reducing information security risk, total cost of ownership, and architectural debt.
Additional Resources
- Learn more about how native visual analytics helps with regulatory compliance in the financial services industry.
- Register here to get notified when the Greenwich Associates survey results on the use of alternative data in financial services are published later this year.
- To learn how alternative data sources improve compliance and regulatory oversight, please watch this webinar hosted by Greenwich Associates with panelists from Nordea Bank, RBC, and Arcadia Data.
- To view a brief discussion on how Arcadia Data helps with cross organizational stress test review, please watch this video.
About Arcadia Data
Arcadia Data provides the first native visual analytics software that runs within modern data platforms for the scale, flexibility, performance and security users need to glean meaningful and real-time business insights and design data-centric applications in the era of big data and IoT. Arcadia Enterprise is purpose-built to analyze large volumes of data without moving it, filling the gap between self-service BI and advanced analytics for use cases like cyber security, connected devices, and customer intelligence. The Arcadia Data platform is deployed by some of the world’s leading brands, including Procter & Gamble, HPE, Royal Bank of Canada, Kaiser Permanente and Neustar. To learn more, visit Arcadia at www.arcadiadata.com. Follow Arcadia Data at @ArcadiaData.