As a leader in providing enterprise software to the capital markets industry, Informatica is well aware of the technological impact of current financial reforms on many segments of that industry. To help its customers fully understand this impact, Informatica commissioned a study by the TABB Group to investigate the ramifications of key new regulations in the United States and Europe on company IT infrastructures, with a specific focus on the OTC derivatives market (also known as the swaps market).

The findings of this study have been published in a TABB Group report entitled “Technology and Financial Reform: Data, Derivatives and Decision Making”, which highlights the critical requirement for a robust messaging architecture within the required new IT infrastructure.

One of today’s largest financial regulation reforms is the Dodd-Frank Act (DFA) in the United States, which overhauls the entire financial system and requires creating and consuming massive amounts of new data. The swaps market will be impacted most of all by DFA, requiring new processes including automated electronic trading, central clearing, reporting to centralized data repositories, and risk management.

The TABB report emphasizes that robust messaging software will be essential to distribute all of this new data throughout the new ecosystem at high speed, stating that “without an upgrade from the makeshift inter-platform communication methods that most market participants use now to a high-speed, high-capacity, reliable messaging backbone, the newly proposed market structure of execution venues, clearinghouses and real-time reporting will quickly fall apart.” This is where Informatica Ultra Messaging can help.

Informatica Ultra Messaging technology, already proven in the most mission-critical capital markets trading applications, is a battle-tested tool ready to help the OTC swaps market do what other markets have done: move to completely automate trading, clearing, and settlement processing. In fact Informatica is already helping early movers to electronic trading in the swaps market, such as a major investment bank that adopted Informatica Ultra Messaging for its rates systems.

A major reason for this strength is Ultra Messaging’s innovative “nothing-in-the-middle” design and broad feature set which gives it the power to meet all of the future messaging technology requirements for the swaps market that are enumerated in the TABB report:

1) high performance/low-latency

2) reliability & high availability

3) all necessary messaging semantics including publish/subscribe and queuing

4) transport protocol flexibility

5) near-linear scalability

6) messaging to high-speed data marts

This robust Ultra Messaging backbone enables swaps market participants in all stages of the process (e.g. dealers; exchanges; reporting entities) to succeed in the new electronic trading world, with extremely high speed/throughput, very high efficiency and reliability, and a lower total cost of ownership. For more information about how Informatica Ultra Messaging can help swaps market companies in this journey, please read the Executive Brief titled: Informatica Ultra Messaging Software Supports Swaps Market Automation. For the Informatica Press Release about this announcement, please click here.