Industries / Financial Services
Financial institutions, and the global economy, can benefit when knowledge is shared. The result of the collaborative model is innovation, and the ability to greatly reduce the cost of information technology (IT), complementing strong business strategies. How innovation occurs, however, is what revolutionizes business. Whether it is the ability to meet ever growing market data volumes or to adhere to new regulations, these are the reasons financial institutions are implementing this new model, a model where it is increasingly necessary to collaborate within a greater IT ecosystem to attain a level of innovation in products and services that can create true differentiation as well as a level of sustained growth in an increasingly competitive environment.
Collaborative Software Initiative brings together like-minded entities that are open to the collaborative model (an open and inclusive process) to work together as subject matter experts to establish a collective vision, to determine the scope and priorities, to execute against the vision, to meet regularly, to guide the project, and to share the cost of the project amongst the group.
CSI SIG
The Shared Assessments Program was developed in collaboration with the BITS member executives of major accounting firms and financial institutions. They had a shared vision of the strong need for a standardized and objective vendor management methodology that would help financial institutions meet regulatory and risk management requirements while significantly reducing costs. The Shared Assessments Program reflects ongoing industry collaboration to establish 'best practices' for evaluating and reporting risk from third-party processors. The result of the collaborative model is the ability to greatly reduce the cost of information technology (IT), while adhering to regulations. The industry tools of the Shared Assessments Program are the Standardized Information Gathering (SIG) questionnaire and the Agreed upon Procedure (AUP). It is with this shared vision that CSI worked collaboratively with BITS to deliver CSI SIG, the XML tool which not only reduces costs, but increases productivity.
Open Market Data
As volumes and computer-driven trading continue to grow, financial institutions cannot afford to implement and be burdened with costly proprietary technologies. To address the needs and demands of ever increasing market data volumes with lower latency, CSI and key financial institutions are forming several core teams of financial service and development experts, that leveraging the collaborative process to create a standards-based open architecture, Open Market Data (OMD) for market data infrastructure. OMD provides standard interfaces and where appropriate standard software that connects the flow from data sources/points of liquidity to trading applications and users. OMD includes feed handlers, interfaces to messaging systems, data services, applications, and middleware-agnostic market data APIs.
This community-developed open standards solution allows financial institutions to better manage their technology choices to improve price performance. These interfaces and commonly used services are being delivered as a set of products under a commercial subscription distributing open source software.
The innovations capable of addressing the specific challenges like these will require collaboration. Collaborative Software Initiative is developing applications with subject matter experts who are passionate about solving their problems collaboratively, supported by our program managers and developers. If you would like to learn how your organization could benefit from the CSI collaborative process,
please accept this invitation to join one of our existing core teams or lead one of your own.
