DTCC Preps Data-as-a-Service Delivery to Ease Data Acquisition for Cost, Compliance

The development of DTCC’s DaaS offering has been driven by demand for better and more timely access to information as clients become “more data-centric in everything they do… they’re increasingly asking us for more information,” says Ron Jordan, chief data officer at DTCC. “It’s really about us looking at how we can better use our information in appropriate ways to respond to those data needs.”

Specifically, clients want data to help achieve greater operational efficiency around risk management and to help them respond to regulatory demands, Jordan says.

“We keep getting demands from clients saying ‘Can you provide data back to us in more usable forms, more timely, across asset classes. Can you provide it to us in ways where we can use it not only for our reconciliation purposes, but we can use it to respond to regulatory demands … [or] throw it into our risk engines?’” he adds. “It’s not the complete datasets that they need for those things, but it is a very important dataset, which contributes to these types of procedures.”

To support the DaaS offering, DTCC has built a data infrastructure that allows the post-trade infrastructure provider to “develop different cuts and slices of data for our clients,” Jordan says. “We’re going to be able to provide them with data in a way that that makes it easy for them to add the insights into that information, and to use that information to help with the challenges of keeping costs down and responding to regulators and reducing risk. So I think they are excited about getting these types of products from us.”

The DaaS offering will initially focus on the fixed income and equities markets, before turning to other areas, Jordan says.

In addition, along with the launch of its data portal, DTCC has improved its exchange-traded fund composition and historical data—one of the datasets that will be available via the portal.

Previously with DTCC’s ETF offering,"clients were only able to subscribe to the ETF data in its entirety," Jordan says, whereas now clients can subscribe only to the specific ETF data they want. For example, many clients want historical data so they can understand how their basket of ETFs may have changed over time. “So we’ve included several years of history, which… clients can purchase on the web portal so they can see the components over time… [and] have a point-of-time composition,” he adds.