Many companies face several issues when they receive data feeds from their brokers and/or trading terminals. Transforming the raw trading data into something that is understood by ITAS has traditionally been a mixture of manual and development effort. Each broker and/or system will have their own style and coding so, either data is manually transformed prior to upload to ITAS, or the transformation is built into logic in BRKIMPORT.

Alternative Solutions

Many brokers/services offer electronic connectivity options to either retrieve a data file (FTP) or the trade data itself (API). The main challenge in these scenarios is instigating the call and typically this would, again, be an ITAS-developed process, either triggered manually or on batch. Enterprise organisations have other tools at their disposal. By adopting an Integration Platform (or an equivalent middleware architecture) it is possible to breakdown the two principle activities; (i) downloading the data from the broker, and (ii) uploading the data to ITAS. Transformation and monitoring activities are effectively brought in-house and the workflow allows automated straight-through processing, often cutting down hours of manual input.

Workflow Sample

1. Middleware request to 3rd party (hosted) service to get data

2. Data is transformed/mapped to ITAS an F&O schema. Any associated data (physical trade reference, trade code) could be retrieved using ClientServices API (depending on pre-defined conditions*).

3. Data is uploaded and Trades created; these can be marked as Instructions to prevent full straight-through if necessary.

* If possible, the ability to link an outgoing 'order' to a physical contract would be of major benefit to aid identification.