AUGUST 2012

UnaVista

UNAVISTA CASE STUDY

The Financial Services Authority’s Transaction Reporting Service (TRS) was the market leading Approved Reporting Mechanism (ARM), allowing firms to fulfil their reporting requirements since the regulation was introducted in 2007. The TRS platform supported over 500 firms, ranging from small brokers reporting a few trades per day, to large banks reporting in excess of a million per day.

Why did the FSA sell TRS?

In 2011, the FSA decided that the market was mature enough to put TRS up for tender, allowing them to concentrate on analysing the data for market abuse.

There were now a serveral competitors in the market to service every eligible firm, all offering more functionally rich services than the relatively unchanged TRS. So the FSA made the decision to put TRS up for tender using a list of minimum requirements:

• The capacity to deal with the high volume of daily transactions;

• The flexibility to manage an extensive and varied client base;

• The resource to provide a trained customer support function;

• A background in the market to reassure TRS clients and safeguard the FSA’s reputation.

The applicant would also have to offer clients equal if not better value. After a year long selection process, London Stock Exchange was chosen by the FSA as best able to meet their requirements.

qThe FSA said:

“The FSA chose the London Stock Exchange because it is an organisation that has been handling transaction reporting for many years, and with its transaction reporting solution on UnaVista it was seen as an ideal choice for TRS clients.”

Once the decision was made, London Stock Exchange contacted all the TRS clients to welcome them and share their plans to upgrade them from the TRS system to the UnaVista Transaction Reporting service. Whilst clients saw this as an upgrade, the overwhelming feedback was that the transition had to be seamless as there was no appetite to make mandated technical changes to their existing reporting processes. To this end, the UnaVista team put in place an ambitious plan to have all 500 clients trained and migrated onto the UnaVista service within a six month period.

Why was UnaVista chosen as the solution?

The “hub and spoke” technical infrastructure of UnaVista was designed to be scalable, allowing the Exchange to migrate all clients on to the platform, an increase in daily traffic of 2540%, with no adverse affect on its processing performance.

With UnaVista’s ability to take in data from clients in any data format, the migration required no technical resource, apart

FSA look for functionally rich ARM to replace its Transaction Reporting Service

AUGUST 2012UNAVISTA CASE STUDY

from automated clients redirecting their FTP destinations. This meant the transition could be quick and straightforward, highlighted by the number of clients ready to migrate the first day the acquisition was legally completed. Every TRS client was given a range of training options to help them interact with the new UnaVista website which, based on clients’ comments, was intuitive and informative. An online training portal with 13 modular training videos was set up to allow clients self-train, on-demand in their own time. Open weekly WebEx training sessions allowed firms to get more in-depth training from their own desk and enabled them to ask questions to the trainer. The clients were also assigned a dedicated account manager, and a direct phone line and email address for any one-on-one support queries they may have had.

qUK Hedge Fund said:

“…..we are pleased with the new UnaVista platform that we are now testing on a daily basis. The functionality and support is excellent.”

Clients on the old TRS system had found that, having submitted transaction reports to TRS, they received limited validation failure reasons and there were no management reports. UnaVista, in contrast, offered a simple, fully audited workflow process with a range of validation, matching, reconciliation, analytical and reporting tools. These tools have enabled firms to have visibility of reporting failures and the controls to manage the handling of these exceptions.

qA spreadbetting firm commented:

“So impressed with the system, I wish everything could be programmed this well”

Over 98% of the clients were on-boarded and reporting through UnaVista within the 6 months timescale. Each client received training on the new system and now benefits from the improved functionality and dashboards. A number of the new clients have since taken advantage of the additional services that are available on the UnaVista platform, such as replay and reconciliation solutions, global and MiFID targeted reference data and the confirmations platform.

With the biggest community of transaction reporting firms, UnaVista continues to develop solutions that span the post trade space and aid clients in the mitigation of operational risk, whilst continuously monitoring the regulatory landscape.

For more information on UnaVista transaction reporting service or any of the other services available on UnaVista, please visit:

http://unavista.londonstockexchangegroup.com or phone +44 (0)20 7797 1214.

UNAVISTA FEATURES

• Quick and easy to set up new clients as UnaVista can receive data in any format

• Highly scalable design ensuring UnaVista can cope with vast volumes and a varied client base

• Full auditing and reporting dashboards allowing firms to view both high-level and low-level detail

• Functionally rich transaction reporting service offering clients the security of additional validation

• Support and training infrastructure to assist clients and help keep them up to date

UNAVISTA STATISTICS

• 440 new clients on-boarded in 6 months

• 10 days on boarding per client

• 1,300 new users

• 5 million transaction reports submitted per day