Natixis refines in-house interoperability model

Paris-based Natixis Investment Managers, which oversees more than $1 trillion of assets, has expanded the data domains of its canonical data model (CDM), the basis on which the firm made interoperability across its front-office platforms possible. Natixis, which spoke to WatersTechnology about its CDM two years ago, had been originally focused on pure asset management datasets related to its 40 active funds, but has since brought its separately managed accounts (SMA) business into the platform’s fold.

George Marootian, head of technology at Natixis, says the move automated the ingestion of all the major data domains within the firm. This has enabled the firm to further contribute to its goal of “taking the human factor out of activities where it’s literally a waste of a human’s time,” he tells WatersTechnology, today.

For example, one of the core uses of these datasets after they’re ingested is enterprise reporting. Anyone at the firm who needs a certified, fully conformed dataset has access to it through the CDM’s API-enabled interoperability with Power BI, Microsoft’s data visualization software that Natixis has chosen to use for all its data analysis, having moved off of Tableau’s software for the same purpose.

Natixis also uses those datasets to feed other systems. For instance, the firm has a handful of self-service tools for its SMA clients, which are handled via a web portal. The CDM acts as the pub/sub—a method of real-time messaging to multiple recipients, often used for streaming analytics—supplier of data to that web portal.

“We’ve used this as an opportunity to create the certified version of all of our data, and we’re now using it as the central nervous system for systems that require that dataset or subsets of that dataset,” Marootian says.

Application interoperability—a rose by many names—has finally come of age in the financial world. Not without its growing pains, and many rebrands, the ability for disparate applications to “talk” to one another and share data and context has become table stakes. But as the available means of achieving this synthesis of applications become more divergent—containers, browsers, clouds, CDMs, APIs—the movement has begun to take a different, constantly evolving shape.

Speaking during a demo at the Open Source in Finance Forum, held in London by the Fintech Open Source Foundation (Finos), Kris West, director of platform consulting at interop provider Interop.io, revealed that the open technical standard that has governed most of financial application interoperability, FDC3, will become a web browser-based standard, replacing the Electron containers that the standard was built on in 2017.

FDC3 is managed by Finos in its capacity as a non-profit that promotes open standards and open-source projects for the finance industry. Participating members of the working group include Citi, Morgan Stanley, State Street, UBS, and 16 other institutions and vendors.

The next generation of the standard, FDC3 2.2, will enable application interoperability within and between browsers, a move that some vendors, including newcomer Connectifi, founded by former FDC3 chair and the standard’s creator Nick Kolba, and Here (formerly OpenFin), have already begun offering.

West said that the group is currently working on the necessary documentation and messaging around bringing FDC3 to the browser environment, all of which will then be voted upon by community members to be adopted officially into the standard’s specifications.

“We’re hoping to make it the recommended thing people will use going forward, but it won’t break the existing applications,” West said.

Though FDC3 has grown and grown, some institutions, including Natixis, have bucked adopting this standardized form of interoperability, arguing that a one-size-fits-all-use-cases approach can leave some out in the cold.

“You have a choice,” Marootian says, “you can either maintain specialization of your dataset, or you can go for highly-conformed, standardized datasets based on your partner. The problem you run into, though, is in our space, we have a business that’s based on customization.”

As an active manager, Natixis needs to be able to service new—or slightly different—use-cases, especially given the individual-driven complexities of its SMA business. If Natixis were a passive shop, though, Marootian says it would look to commoditize its datasets more, and it would look for a vendor partner. But today, Natixis stakes its appeal on its ability to cater to specialties and customization—two things that Marootian says FDC3-based interoperability can hinder.

To that end, though, Marootian and Natixis are following the same route as the FDC3 crowd by working toward browser-based interop, albeit on their own.

“We’ve been doing a lot of consolidation of JavaScript layers, removing hard applications from the mix altogether, and doing things that are more browser-oriented. … Our world is a [Microsoft] Edge and Chrome world, and we have the ability, within the next year or two, to literally pick one or the other and collapse into either one—which is the vision we have moving forward.”