AlacraBlog: Alacra Year in Review

(Posted by Colin duSaire, VP Information Management)

2006 was an exciting year for Alacra’s Concordance Group as we successfully “productized” our company and industry group mapping expertise. Concordance had been the underpinning of everything at Alacra but had never been offered as a product on its own. So this year was big.

In addition to closing a handful of customer deals, this year we expanded our focus from public and private company identifiers (ticker symbols, UK registration numbers, etc. mapped to our content partners’ identifiers - e.g. DUNS Number, Thomson ID) to include debt market identifiers from some of the rating agencies such as Moody's, S&P, and Fitch Ratings. Next year we plan to add identifiers for Special Purpose Vehicles, Credit Default Swap and perhaps even US municipal bonds.

Alacra’s Concordance product is typically configured by each client in terms of both content and delivery. Typically, the customer requires a fixed set of identifiers be mapped to a group of entities. The entities can be internally defined by them or defined by a set of criteria; for example, all companies that trade on NYSE. The client delivers the list of companies to Alacra where it is concorded against the content set and exported back to the client according to a predetermined schedule. Alacra takes care of the impact of corporate actions, resolving new vs. former names and any M&A activity which affects the client set. Clients are then free to load this information back into their systems and use according to any licensing agreements they have for external content. Delivery can be in a number of formats, full refresh or changes only.

One important planned enhancement for 2007 is Concordance-on-demand, which will offer a more self-service, web-based model for accessing Alacra’s Concordance information. Thanks to the Alacra team for all their hard work in 2006 as we look forward to 2007 with great anticipation.

This post is the third in the Alacra Year-in-Review series.

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