Citi Rolls Out Velocity Clarity Big Data on Demand with Analytics Platform

The Velocity Clarity solution integrates data from multiple Citi custody and fund products through the bank’s private, cloud-based big data infrastructure and provides online functionality and visualization for users through a series of dashboards and analysis tools, with the aim of reducing the complexity of navigating instrument data.

Bill Pryor, global product head for data and analytics, custody and fund services at Citi, tells WatersTechnology that the vision behind Clarity was to develop a system based on big data technologies for the custody and funds space, which firms including Amazon, Google and Facebook have already been utilizing in other markets.

“Based on some of the exploratory development efforts of one of our innovation lab sites we identified clear inefficiencies around loading up and consuming vast amounts of information quickly and cost-effectively and providing access to that data,” says Pryor. “We began to build out the big data lake and consume custody and fund services data to layer it through fund digitalization and a high level of customization capabilities.”

Data is consolidated within the platform from Citi’s custody and fund services products, clients’ own internal systems and third parties, using the bank’s big-data-on-demand structure and application program interface (API) technology, presented through a series of customizable dashboards that provides options for monitoring and analyzing investments including portfolio analysis, valuations, holdings, net asset value, counterparty risk, country exposures and trading flows.

The flexibility of the platform was a key design feature according to Pryor, who says that due to the way in which the markets are constantly moving, the information presented by the dashboards will change from day-to-day as user requirements evolve.

“If you think about the traditional, report-centric model our industry has been using for decades, you get a report in the morning which tells you a few things but then your question will be different from what it was the day before, so the journey you need to go on may include a number of different reports,” he explains. ”The analytics in Velocity Clarity allows users to drill down in a free-form fashion and navigate towards answers in a more intuitive manner.”

Data management is a key focus for many industry participants in the run-up to the introduction of the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive review (Mifid II) in January next year, as regulatory reporting requirements are set to change. Currently, the operation involves sourcing and extracting data from a variety of inputs, but Pryor expects that Velocity Clarity has the potential to ease that burden as the system develops.

“We believe that as the data gets more robust in the data lake over the next year or so that it will help bring efficiencies to the regulatory reporting process,” he says.

The Velocity Clarity platform has currently been rolled out to around 30 pilot clients among the Citi custody and funds series base since the start of the year and Pryor says Citi aims to increase the number of users on the platform to a few hundred by the end of 2017.

Dublin-based Irish Life Investment Managers (ILIM) is one of the test clients already using the platform. “The dashboards allow for flexible data interrogation and the visualizations are intuitive and insightful,” says Ciara Geoghegan, director of operations and finance at ILIM. “It streamlines what has historically been a much more complex data navigation process.”

Correction: This article has been updated to correct the spelling of Ciara Geoghegan’s name.