Markit EDM, the enterprise data management (EDM) business of Markit that merged with IHS in July 2016, has laid out its roadmap for 2017 including functional expansion of its EDM platform and a focus on delivering improved data visualisation to business users. Working with IHS, a provider of proprietary information, analytics and solutions to a range of global industries, Markit EDM is also planning to extend its market reach beyond financial services into other market sectors.

We recently caught up with Markit EDM managing director, Spiros Giannaros, to find out more about the company’s roadmap, including its research and development themes, its solutions for incoming regulations such as Markets in Financial Instruments Directive II (MiFID II), and its ambition as part of IHS.

The company’s data management plans for the financial services sector focus on the expansion and delivery of the Markit EDM platform as an enterprise or managed service solution designed to package as much functionality as possible and empower business users. Responding to a market with ever larger datasets and processing needs, as well as increasing intra-day and real-time data requirements, Giannaros explains: “Over the past 18 months, we have focussed on technology, for example how we can process more data in memory and with improved performance. In 2017, our focus is on business, pushing up all the workflow configuration to the business level so that business can quickly understand data and create visual presentations of the data.”

Commenting on the expansion of the Markit EDM platform, Giannaros says: “The platform includes data management, a data warehouse and pieces of data governance and data distribution. We want to build robust data governance and distribution capabilities to provide a complete data lifecycle.”

The company is working on a data governance product that will automate governance to the greatest extent possible and support functions such as data lineage and regulatory compliance. Like other Markit EDM products, the data governance module will be system and vertical market agnostic. Giannaros expects to provide more detail on the product during this quarter, with release due later this year.

Expansion of the Markit EDM data distribution offer builds on the 2015 acquisition of CoreOne Technologies and last year’s integration of the VistaOne data warehouse and vReporter reporting solution into the EDM platform. The company is now working on a data dictionary to improve data access and a reporting module including a user configured dashboard and reports across EDM and the EDM warehouse. The company expects to release a first version of the data dictionary in the middle of this year and reporting modules towards the end of the year.

Recognising the data management challenges of regulation, IHS Markit recently added several MiFID II solutions to its offerings across regulations including Solvency II and BCBS 239. The solutions include transaction reporting based on the Markit EDM platform and are expected to play into Fundamental Review of the Trading Book (FRTB) requirements when the regulation comes into force in January 2019.

Heading into 2017, Markit EDM has over 200 clients, most of them buy-side investment managers. Of the total, 40 are using the company’s managed service and about 20 are new clients that went live in 2016. Giannaros expects a further 20 to 25 clients to go live this year. He comments: “Markit EDM’s differentiator is its service delivery. None of our competitors come close to our achievement of going live with over 100 clients over the past four years. Delivery is important.”

More clients, but in different sectors, are also expected to result from Markit EDM’s growing relationship with owner IHS. Giannaros is tasked with taking the EDM platform into sectors where IHS is already strong, such as energy, where four customers have signed up. Other data intensive sectors such as healthcare are also on the horizon, along with the potential to bring IHS’s proprietary datasets to Markit EDM clients wanting more, and more detailed, market predictors.