Trade Breaks & Data Accuracy

Introduction

An internal project to categorise and report on Trade Breaks was proving unsuccessful, as the users had little confidence in the accuracy of the data that was being presented to them. This resulted in various departments manually creating their own versions of the reports, with none of the reports matching each other.

Challenges

1. Major International bank’s global markets team struggling to build accurate trade reconciliation KPI’s.
2. Multiple versions of the truth seen within its trade close performance dashboards, leading to loss of faith in business intelligence layer.
3. Compounding this with the BI team were not able to explain the errors, as there were  no tools implemented that can help provide the end to end data lineage to identify the root cause of the errors, and identify ways to fix them.
4. Issues compounded further by siloed nature of business with business team and IT team not being able to work side by side with existing platforms in a transparent manner to perform troubleshooting of the multiple version of the truth root cause.
5. The Bank was not able to put in place evidence based decisions on how to improve trade reconciliation performance, as underlying data was not providing a coherent and singular version of what the issues were.

Solution

The Bank was advised regarding an agile ETL and data lineage platform it uses with its regulatory reporting unit could be adopted within the global markets team to help fix the single version of the truth issues – however, the existing skills did not exist within IT team to operationalise the use of this platform.

Pomerol Partners data lineage team designed and implemented a statement of work to operationalise the platform.

A platform was set up and connected to all relevant data sources.

The business controls were built in collaboration with IT and the business team to re-create the controls being used in the traditional ETL platforms.

The Pomerol team performed a forensic level data lineage analysis with the business team to identify the root cause of the multiple version of the truth problems.

The IT team were trained to allow them to use the agile data lineage platform, and provide ongoing support to the BI team.

Technical Solutions

Lavastorm performed a data cleansing and transformation which identified & catergorised trade breaks.

Ability to view the data at each step of the transformation.

Providing users with confidence in the data accuracy.

Ultimately providing an official reporting channel which provided a single source of the truth for all employees.

Benefits

1. The source of the multiple version of the truth issues were identified, and governance controls put in place to ensure errors do not creep back into the system.
2. Single version of the truth implemented in the Business Intelligence layer.
3. Key decision makers confidence in the trade close information provided by the dashboards restored.

Impacts

The bank could begin to put in place actions to improve the performance of trade close system.

Revenue leakage through errors in the closing process could be identified and reduced.