NICE Taps SIX-Xignite Cloud Data Combo for Trade Surveillance

NICE Actimize has fortified the datasets available for use in its Surveil-X trade surveillance tool, using exchange prices and other data from Swiss vendor SIX, delivered via Xignite’s new suite of microservices for content distribution and data management.

The vendor is preparing to go live with the joint solution “any day now,” after completing some final data validation, says Sam Sundera, head of future business at SIX, who is based in the San Francisco Bay Area, and is responsible for dealing with partners, new technology data and initiatives, and with banks’ innovation labs.

The data includes all the market and reference data available via SIX’s MDF, and VDF feeds, respectively. Xignite connects to SIX’s data in a co-location facility, where it deploys feed handlers to process the feeds, then sends the data to its ticker plant in Amazon Web Services’ cloud. Xignite recently unveiled its suite of data management microservices to support clients’ migration to cloud services.

“When we started talking to NICE, they told us that they wanted to migrate to a cloud solution, and they wanted data from more than 170 markets, whereas we had around 50. So we recommended they use our technology, and use SIX as a potential source,” says Xignite CEO Stephane Dubois. “SIX has been a long-term provider of data to us, so we already have lots of interfaces to their feeds and data.”

Xignite and SIX needed to collaborate on some enhancements relating to data capture. Because NICE Actimize is using the data to support trade surveillance and fraud detection, Dubois says the vendors needed to provide not just quote and trade data, but also the context around specific trades. “They need to query massive amounts of quote and trade data. So … we needed to enhance the capture of quote data as well as trade data,” he says.

Though not the incumbent provider of data for Surveil-X, SIX had existing on-premise data relationships with NICE, which wanted an entirely cloud-based platform to power the surveillance tool, Sundera says. “That was something we couldn’t have delivered alone. So, working with Xignite, who does that really well, allowed us to serve that need. We have some very valuable, rich datasets … and Xignite allows us to make that available to new customers.”

These could include clients beyond SIX’s core base of back-office clients and asset servicing firms, such as buy-side firms, and front- and middle-office business functions, and providing its data in formats that these new client bases want.

“The back office is used to writing to our formats. But on the buy side or in the middle office, where demands are different [and which may use different data formats], Xignite is enabling us to approach those. These areas don’t want to write to big feeds like ours. They want very rapid development,” Sundera adds. “We bring the data to the table, Xignite brings its native cloud platform that delivers our data in the way that clients want to access it.”

NICE Actimize declined to comment for this article.