Introducing Alacra’s Concordance Intelligence Application

Despite the financial market turmoil of the past several months, one Alacra product continues to find new customers and expanded usage at long-time subscribers: Alacra Concordance.  The need to clean and maintain accurate information on clients and business partners has never been more acute.  And, multiple data silos within an organization significantly increase the risk of error which can lead to financial, legal and reputational risk.  So financial institutions, professional service firms and corporations continue to turn to Alacra to cleanse and de-dupe internal databases and map and append entity identifiers from critical business information publishers. 

 

Historically, articulating where Alacra’s Concordance offering fits into a client’s data management activities has been challenging.  As we explore a prospect’s needs our sales pitch is conceptual; the sales cycle then culminates in our taking a sample of a prospect’s data and running it through our Concordance process.  We return to the prospect a report that highlights where we found erroneous data, how it was corrected and a mapping of all the entity identifiers mapped to each entity in the sample.  The process is lengthy – it takes a long time before a prospect will agree to give us a sample.

 

In an effort to both prove our capabilities before the sample phase and give existing clients additional functionality, we developed the Concordance Intelligence Application (CIA).  CIA provides clients with view into our Concordance database and its attributes.  For prospects, CIA sits on top of the Alacra universe of entities or securities.  For clients, CIA sits on top of their universe.  Using any tracked attribute the Concordance data can be viewed from practically any angle.  Attributes include; name, entity type or subtype, industry classification, geographic location, public/private, primary exchange, security types, and publisher coverage.  For example, generating a list of asset management entities located in Japan rated by Moody’s can be done in seconds.  In today’s market having this data at your fingertips can be extremely powerful.  Having your data at a point where you can run these queries is imperative. 

 

In addition to generating a list of entities based on the desired criteria CIA allows you to drill down into a specific entity or security and generate a snapshot.  This is a single view which displays; legal name and address, industry classification (Alacra, SIC, NAICS, GICs), subsidiaries, securities, public identifiers (ticker, ISIN, SEDOL, etc.), proprietary identifiers (Moody’s KMV, S&P ID, etc.), and ultimate parent.  Client reference data and identifiers can also be included on the snapshots.  CIA enables clients to retrieve real-time views of how Alacra has cleaned and mapped their universe of entities.  This includes how the mapping was accomplished across that client’s multiple data silos as well as which Alacra entity the client has been mapped to. 

 

Future enhancements will include the ability to see a log of corporate events (M&A, IPO, name changes, etc.) on the snapshot.  Client will also be able to use the tool to communicate with Alacra project teams on specific records.  If they feel that a record was incorrectly mapped or that the reference data is not accurate this information can be sent back to Alacra for further investigation. 

 

The initial launch of CIA is scheduled for the week of November 1.  Please feel free to contact us if you would like to learn more about our Concordance service or the CIA tool.