Johannesburg, 22 Jun 2004
Chicago-based Options Clearing Corporation (OCC), the world`s largest securities and exchange clearing organisation for options derivatives, has chosen Ascential Software`s DataStage Enterprise Edition to help power FIXML transaction processing with its 130-member institutions. Ascential Software is distributed locally by CenterField Software.
The financial information exchange (FIX) protocol is a messaging standard developed specifically for the real-time electronic exchange of securities transactions. FIX is a public domain specification owned and maintained by the FIX Organisation. FIXML is a derivative of Extensible Markup Language (XML), the hybrid language of the Internet.
"OCC will use Ascential DataStage Enterprise Edition to help transform a range of financial or options data, including positions, trades, settlements and product data, into FIXML for distribution by OCC`s Encore clearing system," says Julian Field, MD of CenterField Software.
Data from Encore goes to financial institution clearing members, trade sources or exchanges, regulatory agencies and other non-clearing organisations.
The Ascential Software solution is designed to extract large volumes of real-time data from a mainframe-based database system, transform it into a special FIXML-based data scheme for the securities industry, and send the processed information in real-time to OCC`s client organisations, Field says.
"Ascential DataStage Enterprise Edition is a critical component of our architecture that will help us migrate our Encore output distribution into FIXML," says Michael McClain, OCC`s vice-president and head of applications development. "Ascential Software will help Encore provide straight-through, real-time processing."
Encore, OCC`s largest system development project, is a highly flexible clearing system designed to readily adapt to changes in contract volume, product offerings and the increased use of the Internet in the derivatives industry.
The Encore application processes FIXML for real-time securities transactions data exchange, and Ascential DataStage Enterprise Edition will handle all FIXML transformations for OCC.
"In the financial services industry, OCC creates competitive advantage by strategically investing in information infrastructure," Field says. "Ascential Software`s solutions are designed to help OCC maintain market leadership by delivering services such as real-time data exchange and straight-through processing."
OCC handles clearing of the options trades for various options exchanges, and regulates the listing of new options. It is regulated by the Securities and Exchange Commission, and is jointly owned by the US stock exchanges that trade options.
The Ascential DataStage Enterprise Edition is a bundling of products around storage, and forms part of Ascential`s Enterprise Integration Suite. The latter is an end-to-end data integration solution that profiles, cleanses and consolidates data from multiple sources, applications and systems, and transforms it into strategic information for public and private sector enterprises.
The suite enables scalability through parallel processing, meta data management, any-to-any connectivity and real-time data integration, Field says. "Ascential Real-Time Integration Services extends the reach and enables the seamless interoperability of Ascential`s data integration solutions within an organisation`s service-oriented architecture."
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