Price Verification
Background
Data Managers have ever increasing responsibilities and duties to ensure that end-of-day or intra-day pricing for enterprise-wide distribution is accurate and verified. Never has there been more regulatory pressure to ensure accuracy, nor as much internal pressure to ensure the highest standards of good governance and the avoidance of Operational Risk. All this comes at a time when there seems to be an ever widening range of new instrument types and OTC instruments. Achieving a verified and credible price is vital. It is also a key requirement that such prices are appropriately archived and are available for reporting.
Prices come from a variety of sources – not just the traditional data vendors such as Reuters and Bloomberg – but also from a range of specialist providers and from in-house applications and spreadsheets, and manual input.
The challenges are to ensure that each of the thousands of data items is collected in a timely manner, rigorously tested against a variety of criteria, published on time, with a clear Audit Trail to demonstrate adherence to best practices, as dictated by regulations. Collection of historic performance statistics should also allow for process analysis and provide support for Six Sigma style continuous process improvement.
The quality of your End of Day Pricing depends on:
- Efficient collection of data to be analysed across a range of Price Zones
- Immediate resolution of data that does not pass the verification process
- timely distribution to all areas and departments
Improving Price Verification
Improvements in the End-of-Day and Intra-Day Pricing area revolve around
- your team being able to pinpoint pressure points
- quick and accurate resolution of exceptions
- timely status reporting to your customers
- resolution Audit Trails
- publishing accurately and on time
Watching the Flow
Each step in the collection and publication of data is a potential source of error and delay. At the highest level, you need an overview of the current real-time status of the process, typically consolidated to provide a summary of the general health of the system. Using a Dashboard type interface, you need to see the percentage (or number) of successful, delayed and failed data items. Depending on your requirements, this view may be differentiated by instrument type, SLA priority or by the sheer importance of particular data items. Your staff will need to have different views of the same process.
Once a problem piece of data item has been identified, you will need as much information as possible to ensure speedy resolution. The monitoring instance needs to understand the detail of each step, of the expected inputs and outputs and of the relevance of the steps and their sequence to the overall transaction. Drill-down functionality is required to view the detail of a failure and manual intervention must be supported and triggered automatically, where appropriate.
Speedy, effective resolution is key. Sometimes the underlying cause is of a technical nature – something is broken and needs fixing, fast. Another time, you are faced with wrong, missing or insufficient data.. Whatever the cause, you need reliable identification of the problem and help in getting it fixed. That help might involve the creation of a workflow instance for manual intervention, correction of bad or missing data using agreed business rules.
And when the problem has been identified, the underlying causes have been found and the steps have been taken to ensure effective resolution, you will probably want detailed Resolution Reports to demonstrate that you and your team have provided first class service in line with the agreed KPIs and SLAs.
PaceMetrics Solution
PaceMetrics offers products and professional services to address these business issues and to ensure that your Data Management Department works to maximum efficiency and precision. In the case of price verification, Price Verification Server will provide the core solution.
PVS can be integrated into an overall solution to ensure that prices used are valid, complete and correct. The Rules Engine determines how price inconsistencies are handled and resolved, workflow tools can be integrated to initiate and to coordinate manual processes. The PVS Dashboard provides a single view of the entire price validation life cycle and allows instant drill-down to facilitate problem resolution. Key parameters can be saved to facilitate analysis of and reporting on the validation process.
Professional Services
Best of breed tools alone are not sufficient to guarantee the successful rollout of an end-to-end Operations solution. No two organisations are the same. The PaceMetrics Professional Services team ensures that the tools are implemented so as to reflect the nuances of your business and to ensure your competitive advantage. The PaceMetrics Professional Services team has a wealth of experience across all areas of the financial services industry and works to a structured but flexible implementation methodology to ensure effective rollout across your Business Processes.