AIM and West Highland Partner for EDM Solution

AIM Software will combine its GAIN data management and EDM platform with WHSS’s Reference Data Framework, a Big Data and data lake caching tool, to allow clients to access and process pricing or reference data in near real time.

The combined product suite offers a single point of access to reduce the number of internal data systems, and makes end-of-day static market and reference data more readily available with expanded storage options. The solution is available for AIM and WHSS clients and can be deployed on-site or through the cloud.

Tom Boran, chief data officer and global head of data services at WHSS, says the rise of high-frequency and low-latency trading has “rippled” through the industry, and clients on both the buy side and sell side need to keep up with trades in a timely fashion. Client demand for a reference data framework that matches these faster transactions motivated AIM and WHSS to partner to provide a solution.

“Firms can’t wait for files to be provisioned at a certain time and day, normalize them and make the necessary decisions they need to make later in the day. They need to do it in real time as soon as a transaction or investment decision is made,” says Boran. “The pace of the industry has increased and accelerated for the people in the mid-office who support profit and loss, risk management, and regulatory reporting functions in the back office. People who manage reconciled trades, innovations and straight-through processing need everything to be accelerated as well, which is why this partnership began.”

To help reduce costs, the AIM and WHSS product suite allows clients to store a number of securities as fields while using the AIM tools to mine that information for best execution, trade processing and risk management. 

Deepak Srinivasan, CTO at AIM Software, says “variety and velocity” for Big Data access is key to the partnership. The two companies plan to launch more products in the future, but Srinivasan declined to disclose details.