Speaking of tradition: This year, the SDS GEOS management circle took place for the last time in its current form. Due to our growing portfolio and the fact that several of our products are often used simultaneously, we have decided to hold one joint event for all our products from next year onwards. But now back to the content of the management circle:
SDS is a sound, organically growing company
The most important news first: We can present steady growth in all areas of our portfolio over the past years. The number of employees, the turnover and the EBIT have increased according to plan and we have reason to believe that we can continue this success story in the years to come. This shows that our decision to expand the portfolio a few years ago was the right one and it gives our customers the reassurance that they have a long-term stable and attractive business partner.
Optimising the data volume for securities master data
The number of available securities on the market for index certificates and warrants is in no reasonable proportion to the instruments actually purchased by investors. This issue has been a topic of discussion across the industry for several years now. Recent analyses paint a dramatic picture: On the Austrian market, ÖWS provides more than two million instruments, over 90% of which belong to the aforementioned securities types. Only about 1% of these, however, have actual holdings. The rest – about 90% of the FI master data – is irrelevant for securities processing. This useless data volume has become a serious organisational and technical problem.
Therefore, it is an obvious idea to remove the unneeded master data or to only provide it on demand. At first glance, this task may seem manageable, but it requires thorough analysis of the affected processes as well as coordination between all parties concerned and it is probably not entirely trivial from a technical point of view either.
In the weeks to come and in collaboration with ÖWS and the Austrian banks, we will work out a solution which takes the technical and financial framework conditions into account and which is likely to offer an attractive business case for all parties involved.
Event-driven architecture
In addition to this current topic, we have focused on the future architecture of our company’s software products. We are faced with multiple challenges:
- The way our product portfolio is expanded creates the demand for an ideal architecture for the interaction of these components during joint usage.
- Modern user experience requires technologically advanced functions such as full-text search, statistics, configurable dashboards, etc.
- External systems should be able to react to status changes in the transaction processing system near time.
In order to accommodate all this, we are currently verifying a so-called event-driven architecture within the framework of a proof of concept (PoC). The core of this architecture is the relief of a transaction processing system (in our case SDS GEOS) from the preparation of data for user interaction, the creation of statistics and complex queries as well as from the process of making data available to external systems.
We have already taken steps in this direction in the past (for instance by supplying data for the Business Information Store) and we now intend to implement the interactions via front-end and the communication of changes back to SDS GEOS. The PoC deals with a specific task from the area of Corporate Actions and should ideally be further developed into a corresponding product for the processing of corporate actions. For this step, we are looking forward to a development partnership with a renowned financial service provider from custody business.
Gossip
In addition to these topics, informal communication over brunch and during the breaks was, of course, not neglected either. Since the composition of the circle has changed compared to last year, we were also able to welcome some new members to the community, and we are looking forward to an exciting and successful collaboration.
