A natural extension to the West Highland offerings was a migration towards the commercial management of market data. We already supported the back end and the front end, so it was logical to develop a vertical to support the back office. West Highland established a commercial management team offering clients the ability to have West Highland augment their team, completely outsource their back office or to have some combination of the two.
A challenge in the industry has always been managing Data Notifications sent from Exchanges and consolidators. The dilemma for client organizations is reducing the time it takes to identify, track, and execute on Data Notifications. Each vendor submits change notices to the clients in different formats and often buried in PDF’s or excel files.
West Highland created an automated Data Notification Manager designed to read in data notifications from aggregators such as Thomson Reuters, Bloomberg, ACTIV Financial and ICE (IDC) Data Systems. The system also accepts data notifications from some of the direct feed vendors, such as the CME or Nasdaq, and consolidates all notifications into a single view. This consolidation and single view gives clients the ability to identify when the data notifications are due, who will be impacted, and what actions need to be taken. The Data Notification Manager offers multiple views, such as a calendar, specific vendor, and all vendors together. An added feature is free text searching to assist in initiatives such as the mifiid22 challenge.
In our commercial management space, West Highland has commoditized the task of market data administration. Clients outsource the management of the Refinitiv DACS platform and the Bloomberg EMRS platform. Permission entitlements and reporting exercises, database administration, etc. all get outsourced to West Highland taking that burden away from our clients.
As part of West Highland’s Concierge Service, inventory and contract management is now offered “as-a-service”. Because of West Highland’s unique expertise in this area, we integrate with the administration of the major commercial management platforms. West Highland’s outsourced service of market data management and cost optimization includes getting the data from the distribution platforms into the inventory systems, assessing usage, invoice reconciliation and inventory synchronization with permission database (DACS). Key to a successful integration is making sure the systems are synchronized and are accurately maintained. A lot of information ends up in an inventory management data base and it’s either old, incorrect or irrelevant. West Highland sanitizes all of the data and makes sure the data is clean, establishing a new ground zero.
We created a win-win situation for both our clients and ourselves by reducing the amount of work and risk that the client has – and made more sense for us as we have visibility into everything that our clients are doing.”
STEVEN R. ROE
CEO, West Highland
