Notifications: the Problem Teens of Data Management

Like teenagers, data notifications can be a major headache. Notifications are used by vendors to communicate any changes that might affect the data being consumed by financial firms. They can also be mundane and routine to something so important that failure to respond appropriately can result in data being cut off or not appearing correctly in the right applications.

So, like teenagers, data notifications need a lot of parental supervision. Leaving them to their own devices is simply ignoring something that might be trivial (“Hey mom, we have a mock trial today”) or could be highly important (“Hey mom, my trial is today”). They can’t take care of themselves, and need to be handled properly—if not they can blow up at you. That means data mangers need to understand whether a notification affects their firm or not, assess the impact of the change, prioritize it, identify what action needs to be taken in response, assign that to someone to handle, and then make sure it actually gets done.

But there are many challenges to achieving that: one is that while systems designed to process these are undoubtedly sophisticated, they don’t understand human language in the same way a human understands it—or creates it. Language and detailed explanations are key, and notifications are no place for tone or nuance (“I’m fine” vs “I SAID I’M FINE!”). Like teenagers, data notifications can be temperamental, sometimes giving short and incomplete answers to questions that demand longer answers. For example, answering the question “How was school today?” with just, “OK.”

One of the key linguistic challenges for providers of systems for handling notifications is understanding what the notification covers: different exchanges and vendors may use different terminology or present their notifications in different formats that defy attempts to compare them. Adding to the complexity, firms may receive duplicative notices—the same original exchange notice, reformatted and re-sent by different vendors that carry the exchange’s data.

For true automation, machine-readable notifications (for those in a position to consume them in an automated fashion) would be a good start. Some say that simply giving each notification a clear and relevant headline that highlights the change and its importance would be a simple but significant change for the better. Vendors and exchanges collaborating to produce standardized notifications formats would be an even greater step towards helping firms understand and handle all the changes.

An exchange notification may be presented differently by different vendors, and different vendors may include their own associated changes—for example, to reflect technical issues that affect how a change impacts them or their customers, or commercial issues such as new pricing, or policy terms and conditions. And there should be an incentive for the exchanges and vendors that produce and distribute notifications to make this process easier, because it also makes it easier for them to ensure compliance, and to rest assured that they will receive payments on time and in full.

Another challenge to properly processing these notifications is making sure they are assigned and completed. The systems being offered to address the challenge by vendors—such as Ropnoy, West Highland Support Services, Jordan & Jordan, and Axon Financial Systems, among others—run the full gamut from full enterprise services that include the ability to assign tasks to individuals and monitor their progress, to lightweight solutions targeting one specific aspect of the process.

Without such systems, firms rely on staff to process data notifications, which means first identifying which email message is actually a notification. Like teenagers, data notifications may be (or feel) ignored. Data managers, like parents, are often doing a hundred things at once, and might overlook them—whatever safety nets you may have in place, it’s always possible that a notification may slip through once in a while (“Mom! Dad! You left me in the house by myself…while you went to Europe!!”).

A change might be technical, but have a cost implication in terms of the resources required to update the APIs. Many data notifications carry an explicit cost component. If a firm misses or doesn’t properly implement a notification relating to a price change, it can face an unexpected bill—not just for a price increase, but back-dated fees for however long the firm has overlooked the fee increase.

So, like teenagers, data notifications can also be expensive. They can be challenging, noxious, and nightmarish to deal with. But we still love them. Teenagers, I mean, not notifications. We all still hate notifications.