Broadridge has developed a data ontology to help capital markets firms integrate and map trade data across front-to-back-office systems.

“Most of our clients believe that if they simplify trade data at a fundamental, ontological level, they can unlock a lot of value and efficiency over time,” says Vijay Mayadas, president of capital markets at Broadridge.

Data ontologies define the categories by which data is organized and the relationships within a dataset. The Broadridge ontology, called the Broadridge Common Element Model (BRx), is a way of structuring and describing trade data across different asset classes to minimize redundancies and ensure the “cleanest relationships” between fields.

Mayadas says financial organizations build up many technology stacks across various asset classes and geographies that are underpinned by fragmented and complex ontologies.

BRx has distilled the key attributes of a trade down to the “most important, mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive elements using a modeling language that is agnostic to the underlying transport layer [and] persistence mechanism and [is] very lightweight, to enable scale and high performance,” Mayadas says.

He says the ontology reduces duplication of data storage and is “future-proofed” by being platform-agnostic. 

Mayadas kick-started the initiative to create BRx soon after starting in his current role over a year ago. At the time, he says, the vendor was looking at ways to help firms simplify how they store data and manage complex ontologies.

The domain expertise for BRx came from Broadridge’s 2017 acquisition of Message Automation, a specialist in extracting and structuring trade data. Message Automation provides connectivity and reporting solutions around multiple asset classes, taking post-trade and front-office data in various formats from disparate sources, such as clearing houses, then normalizing it and feeding it into risk and treasury systems, as well as a transaction repository.

“We have evolved the ontology to be something that clients can now start thinking about using. There is a lot of interest in that, and how it could fit into a post-trade and front-to-back strategy,” Mayadas says.  

Translating data across platforms 

Some early use cases for BRx have included mapping data across different platforms within Broadridge itself. In March this year, the vendor announced a partnership with Access Fintech to help resolve multi-party settlement failures. “BRx is the ontology we are using in the adapter we have created between Broadridge and Access Fintech,” Mayadas says. 

The vendor is also using BRx as a mechanism to translate trade data between its post-trade platform and trading technology provider Itiviti, which it acquired earlier this year.

“Let’s say you want to integrate Itiviti into our international post-trade platform. We would use BRx as the translation mechanism between Itiviti trade data and our post-trade platform. So, it’s a highly optimized adapter with a very lightweight ontology to minimize the friction of translating data,” Mayadas says.  

Broadridge also expects tier-two banks to be among those clients adopting BRx. Mayadas says the ontology is ready to go and the vendor is talking to clients about how they could use it. “Over time, ourselves and our clients will be more deeply embedding BRx into the way data is transported at various levels in the technology stack,” he says.

He adds that the ontology could also prove useful to capital markets firms that are not Broadridge clients but might be seeking to “evolve” their own ontology.

Over the years, Mayadas says, capital markets firms have built up their own platforms and ways of storing data. “Given our position in the market, that we have a lot of clients, and we are a neutral fintech vendor in terms of not being aligned to any given standard, and given that there is a lack of a standard around how you best structure post-trade data … we feel we are a very natural partner to help create that standard,” he says.   

Wider acceptance 

Mike Bennett, an ontologist at Scotiabank and the standards liaison for technology standards consortium the Object Management Group, says an initiative such as BRx will find wider adoption if it is published by a standards body rather than a vendor. 

Bennett was the originator of the Financial Industry Business Ontology, an initiative by the EDM Council and the OMG to establish a common ontology for the financial industry. He says Broadridge could hypothetically join the OMG and get involved with the Fibo initiative, contributing any new terms the vendor might have, adding that standards are created through collective industry efforts rather than single providers: “That is how standards work. Standards don’t work by some vendor going: ‘I am big enough to do a standard.’”

That’s not to say Broadridge’s ontology could not be adopted by the industry, however. “It is not impossible,” Bennett says. “Bloomberg has brought standards to the OMG. But as soon as it becomes the standard, it is no longer owned by that vendor. Vendors cannot imagine that they have a thing that’s globally adopted and it [can remain solely] their thing.”

Fibo was developed nearly a decade ago and continues to be updated. “We are looking at a number of mapping techniques for different data model designs. That is the thing that some of the banks are struggling with right now,” Bennett says.