SmartStream
A new kind of gold S
A data lake
allows you to store structured and unstructured data in a centralised location, and is one of SmartStream’s methods of managing data.
martStream is a company with a long history in post-trade processing and the implementation of digital strategy for financial services companies – but its heritage and experience are combined with a forward-looking and innovative approach to meeting client needs. The company prides itself on helping customers to meet both today’s and tomorrow’s challenges head on. Rocky Martinez, the chief technology officer, SmartStream Reference Data Utility, ensures that his employer leverages both its rich history and pushes product development forward. “We have to make sure that we can deliver to existing customer demands, but at the same time keep innovation moving forward,” he says. “There is an old saying, attributed to Henry Ford, who when asked why he didn’t ask his customers what they wanted, replied ‘because they would still want horses’. If you don’t force
Data is the new global currency in fi nancial services – and it must fl ow freely. Jim Banks talks to Rocky Martinez, CTO of the SmartStream Reference Data Utility, about how banks can manage, store and access their data more quickly, more effi ciently and at a much lower cost, all to derive tangible business benefi ts.
change then your product won’t be viable in two or three years.” Certainly, the technology industry changes at an incredibly fast rate. While it took 75 years for the telephone to reach 50 million users, and 33 years for television to hit the same milestone, the internet reached that mark in just four years. The fundamental currency of today’s digital technologies, meanwhile, is data. It makes sense, therefore, that a major part of SmartStream’s work focuses on reconciling and providing access to large volumes of accurate data in the most efficient way possible. “Today, financial institutions are basically technology companies, so we have to make sure that their data is always accurate,” says Martinez. “The key here is that the data has to be right because that is the product, so we spend a lot of time building internal pools to ensure that data is accessible and we are constantly using new ways to get to the data, like Snowflake or AWS Data Exchange, so we have developed APIs to reduce the time it takes to get access to the data we manage.” “That way we don’t need to break it up and put it in a database and then figure out how to get it to your customers,” he adds. “APIs give you instant access and you don’t have to worry about storage – if you need the data again you can just go and get it.”
A new paradigm for data Many banks are stuck in the old habit of using file transfer protocol (FTP) and databases, which can slow down access to data and add to the cost of data management. In this model, data has to be transferred from one place to another and servers may be used inefficiently. Now, APIs can be used to bring together data from diverse systems faster and more efficiently. Martinez sees banks moving towards data platforms such as Snowflake and AWS Data Exchange, which are designed to increase the speed to value for third-party data sets in the cloud. “SmartStream now has a public portal so that clients can look at their data and get comfortable with it,” he explains. “We are also seeing some large clients talk about wanting to move away from FTP, so we have started bringing data together through AWS
22 Future Banking /
www.nsbanking.com
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