Willow Partners with Harco Technology
Introduction
Willow Solutions frequently partners with
companies that analyze and optimize the use of real-time market data. One such company,
Harco Technology, provides its
clients with products that optimize their expenditure on market data by
evaluating actual consumption as opposed to simply tracking cost. Willow has
worked with Harco to help identify redundant expenditures and reduce
unnecessary costs to significantly impact client's performance and their bottom line.
Harco Technology
Harco Technology
is the company behind DART (Data Access Reporting Tool). DART is designed to
allow rapid market data usage analysis on DACS/TIB and for market data
delivered via web portals. DART will assist the efficient market data manager
to identify unused (and potentially very costly) products/exchanges/specialist
services provided to the trading room.
In order for DART to be effective the product
must be able to analyze market data usage at varying levels of detail. For
instance, DART can be used to show all traders that are paying for an exchange
but have never used it. Of course, DART also works at a much more detailed
level and can be used to show what market data a trader is consuming in each
desktop application to the instrument level.
Spreadsheets, most notably Microsoft Excel, have
become one of the most important and widely used tools of financial market
professionals. If you walk into any large trading room you will see traders,
analysts and their associates working with Excel spreadsheets. Nearly all the
real-time data vendors feature spreadsheet add-ins which allow real-time,
historical or various types of analytical information to be retrieved into a
spreadsheet where it can be used to create a trading or investing model. Many
traders don't make a move without first reviewing their spreadsheet models.
The real-time, historical or analytical
information which is accessed by these spreadsheets costs money. At first
glance it may seem that it may be part of the standard market data usage cost
but in many instances it can be a source of redundancy or an unnecessary
expense which can be easily eliminated and obtained from another source at no
cost.
In a recent example of such a situation, a DART
report identified that Bloomberg's data products were used more widely than
Reuters by a group of fixed income traders. The Reuters data was only used in
spreadsheets. Many spreadsheets were found which contained links to Bloomberg
for pricing and historical information and links to Reuters to obtain
information from foreign sources such as a series of Libor rates. The obvious
redundancy is that Bloomberg can also provide information on Libor rates.
It is perfectly possible, of course, to apply
this methodology in the other direction. That is, DART is capable of
identifying that a trader is using a Bloomberg only for mail and that an
alternative desktop application (say Kobra) is a more cost effective solution.
Although the trader or analyst may be aware of
this redundancy eliminating the unneeded data vendor is not an easy process. To
convert the fields with information from one data vendor to another is a
tedious and time consuming process.
Willow has developed a conversion
tool that provides a solution to this problem. The
conversion tool automates
the process of converting real-time formulas from one data
vendor into the real-time formulas of another data vendor. The tedious,
error-prone conversion process which could take days or weeks now can be
accomplished in a matter of hours.
If you require more detail contact us at
info@willowsolutions.com.
|
