VERSION

CONTROL
january 14th/2014

Financial IT speaks with Fiona

Hamilton, VP EMEA Operations
at Volante Technologies Inc.,
about innovative approaches to
data integration process across
the financial industry and the
recently launched V5 of the Volante
Designer product.
As Vice President for EMEA, Fiona
has responsibility for day to day
operations within her region and also
growth into new services, countries,
products and message standards
migration within EMEA.

Financial message-based
data integration has
never been easier
Fiona, what is the name of the flagship product you wish to showcase in Version Control?
Volante Designer. The product is a suite of modular software tools capable of
handling the most complex data integration and management challenges.
From arrival, through process workflows, downstream integrations, persistence
into databases, metadata-based governance, and model-based new development;
each component offers a new and better way to address the challenges of data
management.
Used by major financial institutions, exchanges and industry utilities around
the world, Volante enables users to rapidly build data integration solutions
to handle data feeds and applications used by both internal and external
counterparties.
Volante Designer brings together simplicity, functionality and speed in a way
that no other data management technology can match.
Volante Designer defines the workflow of the data processes. It takes into
account how information is routed between parties, what the parties seek to
do with it, what type of data it is (e.g. SWIFT, FIX, FpML etc.), the source, validity,
structure, exceptions processing and how it needs to be transformed to be
consumed by other parties or target applications.
Volantes user-interface that generates code enables us to build cartridges
(logic which ultimately generates the code) based upon the models for sources or
targets.
Volante provides a comprehensive data management framework, supporting
standards and normalisation, data flow and workflow, virtualisation and SOAs,
data governance, and model-driven initiatives.
What are the benefits of the product to end users/customers?
Volante handles the management of message complexity, so firms can improve
their straight-through-processing (STP) rates and take full advantage of their
commercial opportunities by increasing operational efficiency, reducing cost and
increasing return on investment (ROI). The speed and ease of adoption of not only
standard message structures and rules but also the model driven code generation
of transformation, validation, routing and enrichment of data, brings agility with
respect to changing regulation, technology and business relationships with
customers and counterparties.
How long does a typical implementation of this product require?
Integration project times can be cut dramatically when using Volante. The
product itself has virtually no implementation time as it can be installed in
minutes. As an integration accelerator tool, the key elements are user training
and best practice architecture consultancy which typically takes a matter of days.
Version Control January 14th/2014

From that point, the length of the project will depend on

the complexity of the requirements which can be anything
from days to months. What is consistent from the Volante
Technologies client base is that compared with hand coded
solutions, integration using the Volante product results
in very significant time savings. Typically in a customer
on-boarding scenario, what would previously have taken a
number of months takes about the same number of weeks.
Who are the end users/customers of Volante Designer?
Major financial institutions use Volante Technologies.
Institutions range from stock exchanges, brokers, industry
utilities, universal and investment banks, corporate
treasuries, ACHs, CCPs and buy-side institutions.
Volante can be deployed across the front, middle and
back office and across all asset classes.
What are the names of the principal competitors to this product
(including the names of the companies which own them)?
C24, Trace, Informatica, Logica, Fundtech, Oracle, IBM
What are the competitive advantages of your product over rival
products?
Volante reduces time to on-board banking and customer
connections thereby releasing revenue streams faster. It
lowers data integration costs for any given project and
reduces total cost of ownership through the delivery of
maintained industry data models and automated upgrading
of integration logic when standards change. The product
also offers self- documentation, platform independence and
dynamic creation of user dashboards, input functions and
exception management.
How Volante positions its product in the market against its
competitors (e.g. price, functionality, speed of implementation
etc.)?
We position our company and product as being totally
focussed on one element. Financial messagebased data
integration. This single focus means our clients benefit
from a company entirely comprised of expertise in how to
develop, maintain and support the integration requirements
of our market. Our commitment to testing has resulted in a
customer base that is entirely referenceable.
Understanding our clients also results in the
functionality, ease of use, speed of implementation,
small execution footprint, low latency and maintenance
automation that are central to our product architecture.
How often is this product upgraded?
Typically a new major release is announced every two years
with optional interim minor releases every three to six

months. Volante supports the current major release and

prior release, although every effort is also made to ensure
backwards compatibility at all times in order to minimise
customer impact.
How are upgrades delivered to existing users?
Upgrades are delivered to customers automatically.
Have you launched, or are you planning to launch, a completely
revised version of this product?
Volante recently released version 5.0 of Designer. We have
also launched off-the-shelf products known as Accelerators
that are designed to speed up adoption of new messages,
standards and protocols as new regulation continues to be
rolled out across the financial services industry.
Please describe how users/customers pay for the product (i.e. the
fee structure)?
Volante believes in understanding our clients requirements
and also the financial constraints that they must work
under whether they are an end-customer or a partner. As
such, the fee structure is always allied to what works best
for both parties.
Are there any important industry-wide trends affecting the
market for Volante product?
Mandated regulatory change means that new instruments,
protocols and standards are constantly being brought to
market. As well as global implications there are domestic
implications in having to migrate legacy systems to new
standards as dictated by new regulation. For instance,
SEPA has and will remain a driver for some time to come
in payments. Increasingly migration from legacy ACH and
Securities Settlement standards to ISO 20022 are common
trends whether domestically such as in Switzerland or
regionally such as T2S. Regulation in the OTC markets with
Dodd-Frank and recently EMIR is also driving integration
projects requirements. A move to Service Orientated
Architecture (SOA) is driving change from a technology
direction.
What is the marketing strategy for this product (i.e. by what
means are you seeking to distribute the product and enlarge its
market share)?
Volante Technologies has a number of threads to its
marketing strategy which cover for example geographic
expansion (three new offices since 2010), exhibiting and
panel participation at industry events, thought leadership
articles in the press and involvement in standards bodies.
Distribution is via direct sales from our offices and from our
extensive network of partners.
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About Volante Technologies

Founded in 2001, Volante Technologies is a global leader in
the provision of innovative financial data integration.
Volante is dedicated to enabling clients navigate and
manage the diverse, complex and constantly growing range
of message formats, standards and protocol challenges
encountered throughout the lifecycle of any financial
transaction. Volante delivers and maintains comprehensive
pre-built plug-ins for over seventy international and
domestic standards such as SWIFT MT and MX, FIX, FpML,
EDIFACT, ISO 20022, and SEPA, as well as proprietary
formats based on XML, CSV and Fixed Width.
Volantes innovative development environment
simplifies the management of message complexity, so

Time
We reduced time to onboard corporates
from 8 to 3 months...
...revenue improved by 600%.

Complexity
Volante provides a simple, easy to use
interface
that manages financial messaging complexity.

firms can improve their straight-through-processing

(STP) rates and take full advantage of their commercial
opportunities. Development times are reduced by 6080%, delivering rapid returns on investment (ROI) as well
as increased operational efficiency for a lower total cost
of ownership (TCO).
Supported by offices in New York, London, Dubai,
Mexico City and Chennai, Volante solutions are employed
by an extremely diverse set of organisations, including
buy-side and sell-side capital market institutions, banks
(Universal, Commercial and Retail), corporate treasuries,
financial industry utilities, clearing houses, exchanges,
systems integrators and application vendors.

Cost
Automation with Volante
compressed the project into 8 weeks
we expected it to take 6 months.

Flexibility
With Volante we are win
we reduce operational risk, improve service
levels, respond to customers quicker, and
build our reputational profile.

Volante Predictions for 2014

To a large degree, Volante predicts that 2014 will bring a continuance of the broad trends seen in 2013, both from a
market and technology perspective. As a financial data integration solution provider, the impact of trends from the physical
implementation of new message structures, changes to existing ones, the on-boarding of new communication end-points
and the dynamic routing and validation of information, will undoubtedly continue to cause on-going challenges for all
members of the financial services industry.

Prediction 1: The continuing impact of existing and new global and regional
regulatory obligations.
2013 saw regulatory reform implemented across many
asset classes such as the global implementation of DoddFrank which created mandatory, trading, affirmation and
reporting venues in the OTC derivatives world. Additionally,
payments infrastructure players in the Eurozone were
forced to focus on preparations for the implementation of
SEPA (Single Euro Payments Area) which was set to come
into force in February 2014 but is now subject to delay.
In 2014, the tail-end of such regulatory reform will
continue to have an impact. Organizations, facing cross
reporting thresholds or non-compliancy due to projects
being left late in 2013, also face the acknowledgement
that stop-gap solutions implemented in order to become
compliant, for on-going maintenance or internal compliance
reasons are now not deemed viable in the long term.
2014 will add to this burden with the implementation
of yet more regulation, this time, in the derivatives market.
Global derivatives regulation such as EMIR will potentially
impact more market participants than Dodd-Frank, owing
to obligations being on both parties to report and a lack of
thresholds. This year also sees the possible implementation
date for reporting of energy contracts to ACER within the
EU. All of these derivatives market reforms will have direct
impacts on the messaging requirements of the affected
organizations which will only be compounded for global

entities that may also be affected by other regional reforms

in for example, Southern Africa and South East Asia.
Whilst SEPA in the Eurozone is theoretically set to be in
place for all Eurozone participants in Credit Transfers and
Direct Debits; given the low adoption figures towards the
end of 2013, especially in Direct Debits, it is hard to see
how all organizations are going to be compliant with a
February-end date. A sentiment much mirrored by the recent
announcement of delay, made by the European Commission.
SEPA, furthermore, will continue to impact beyond
the February 2014 date with the February 2016 date
for compliance for non-Eurozone countries which will
undoubtedly have a global impact given the Euros
significance in world currency markets. In my opinion,
though it is unlikely that this latter deadline, will have a
major impact this year, as experience shows that generally
speaking, the market waits until the last minute to respond
to regulatory end dates as the financial imperatives most
entities operate with encourage a well if we dont have to
do it next quarter why spend the money approach.
The first half of 2014 will ultimately be a time for
entities to implement fully compliant solutions in order
to avoid fines or financially burdensome costs associated
with paying service providers to transform data on their
behalves into compliant formats.

Prediction 2: Increasing adoption of ISO 20022

Many millions of words have been written over the
past decade about the ISO 20022 financial standard
methodology and the resulting largely XML structured
artefacts that result across many asset classes. The
standard has undoubtedly been a slow burner and the
revolution to financial messaging has been hard to realize

without regulatory or network provider imperative. This

is however slowly changing and the pace seems to be
gathering as certain sectors such as Investment Funds and
Supply Chain Finance have adopted and mandated ISO
20022 within the SWIFT and Bank Payment Obligation
(BPO) world.
Version Control January 14th/2014

Volante sees regulatory pressures increasing pace

not just over 2014 but for some years to come as new
services driven by regulatory reform such as Target2
Securities (T2S) need to be implemented and live by
2015. There are also obvious signs that many payments
automated clearing houses (ACHs) and domestic

securities settlement clearers have intentions to migrate

away from their legacy message formats which were
largely fixed format or based around ASCII variable
formats such as CSV. This trend that started with
countries such as Japan and Switzerland, we predict will
continue with gathering momentum.

Prediction 3: The continuing move away from legacy to services and cloud-orientated
architecture
2013 saw a definite increase in the perceived demand
for Service Orientated Architecture (SOA)-based
solutions for data and message integration as top and
middle tier organizations particularly, look to rationalize
often heterogeneous and geographically disparate
systems and functions. Again, this trend we believe will
continue into 2014 and beyond, and in many ways, will
only increase with the impact of the other predictions
made in this article.
Organizations need to be able to implement
architecture that allows them to centralize functions
such as IT and physical communication channels whilst
still being able to support country specific requirements.
Implementing services that can be used regardless of
location for message format transformation, validation,
enrichment, storage and routing are well serviced by a
SOA infrastructure and will help realize other cost benefits
where other highly flexible open technologies such as Java
and Linux are utilized. So, whether it is the implementation

of a centralized payments hub or an OTC derivatives

reporting hub that is required, by extension, everything can
be leveraged on the same architecture.
2014 also seems likely to be somewhat of a threshold
in terms of the likely maturation of the cloud architecture
proposition within wholesale financial markets. Cloud
technology has been around for some time, but the
inherent and understandable security concerns of entities
with regard to physically locating core services anywhere
outside their own proprietary infrastructures, has somewhat
hampered its adoption. The undoubted cost benefits and
flexibility of scaling to demand and rapid integration
with new end-points is eroding that reluctance. Volante
forecasts increasing adoption of cloud-based services such
as SAPs Financial Services Network (FSN). By adopting
these infrastructures, organizations will also be increasing
the centralization of reported data both in volume and in
depth thereby creating valuable big-data sets that can be
mined with appropriate tools.

How is Volante supporting these drivers in

their product?
As a product company wholly focused on the financial
data integration market, it is important that we anticipate
and prepare in advance of market requirements. So much
of what is required to support the market has already
been built into the product set in 2013 or is in the near
term development and testing roadmap. In addition to
the creation of comprehensive data models representing
new and amended message formats for regulatory change,
Volante has implemented and will continue to add to,
its repository of legacy data formats and off-the-shelf
transformations to aid migration. We have also enhanced
the products ability to seamlessly deploy within any SOA
or cloud infrastructure and specifically implemented

full SAP IDOC and FSN support. Latterly, the product has
also had big-data support added in the form of being
conformant with the Apache-Hadoop standard.
The move to adoption of SOA infrastructure has also
resulted in Volante implementing more out-of-the-box
functionality with regards to the routing of data and
visualization of the end-to-end message choreography.
We intend to continue to add to these enhancements
throughout 2014 and beyond, and will maintain our
focus on implementing whatever message or technology
functionality our customers require to support their
ever-increasing regulatory and cost efficiency demands in
relation to data integration.
Version Control January 14th/2014