Rimes in the time of corona: Making sense of volatility

At Rimes, we’ve looked to apply our data management expertise to help mitigate some of these challenges facing clients as a result of COVID-19. Doing so, we’ve relied on our core capabilities – market data sourcing, quality assurance, validation, and distribution – but on a scale we’ve never seen before.

Take market events data as a case in point. To help firms keep a handle on the fast-changing situation, we’ve been logging, reviewing and communicating all material events as they occur. To date, we’ve processed more than 50 such events – and with the pandemic still unfolding this number may well rise.

Another challenge for investment managers in recent months has been the widespread disruption to index rebalancing schedules. This is an area no firm wants to get wrong, as missing a rebalance can and does result in significant losses. Drawing on data straight from index providers, we maintain a rebalancing calendar for clients, which can be accessed on RIMES Online.

We’ve made more than 30 adjustments to the calendar as new data has arrived and alerted clients proactively. This has involved making sense of a large and disparate amount of vendor notifications – an important task but one that would be time consuming for firms to undertake alone. To help further, where rebalances occur outside of expectation, RIMES is set up to ensure preview data is made available to clients immediately and systematically.

Other key changes that we’ve helped clients address include:

• Sudden market closures demand that index providers restate their data to make up for resulting price inconsistencies. We’ve helped clients mitigate the effects of more than 10 market closures by validating and reloading restated data and providing impact assessments.
• We’ve tracked and communicated more than 10 changes to market holidays so clients have been ready to load market data for that day.
• The market has seen around 10 times the normal volume of dividends postponed or fully cancelled. We’ve managed this impact to index data on behalf of clients – from exceptions handling to data correction.

Volatile markets mean volatile data. As a result, the number of data exceptions we’ve managed has doubled. However, RIMES is built for scale and we’ve been able to adjust to these unprecedented workloads with ease. Meanwhile, our dedicated performance team has worked around the clock to ensure that tolerances and thresholds can adapt to remain relevant where significant market movements have consistently occurred.

Market change at the pace experienced in recent weeks shows that financial sector firms’ operations need to be as agile and responsive as possible. At RIMES, we believe the best way to do this is through elastic, managed data services that add real value to clients’ businesses.

Rimes Managed Data Services is a proven data operating platform that helps firms of all sizes and in all regions align their data consumption closely with business needs. Contact us to learn more.

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