Ropnoy Preps Outsourced, On-Demand Data Notifications Management

London-based process automation software vendor Ropnoy is planning to launch a new on-demand service before the end of this month, to give data professionals an additional option for handling the rising tide of data notifications.

Ropnoy is still fleshing out full details of the service, dubbed WISE (When In Short, Employ), but director Lisa Nicholson says it will provide a managed service for handling data notifications when firms don’t have enough resources to handle them in-house, and deliver, by email, reports on which notifications affect them.

Data notifications are notices provided by vendors detailing any changes to instruments carried by their services—such as changes to instrument codes for securities that might be held in a firm’s portfolios, or might be used by calculation or trading applications—often delivered as an attachment to emails. Firms must then compare the contents of those files against the securities used in their systems to determine which are affected, and make any changes necessary to ensure their data flow continues uninterrupted.

Ropnoy and other vendors offer tools for managing parts of this process. Ropnoy itself already provides a core platform, Data Notification Analyzer, and a more lightweight suite of services, DN Bureau. WISE provides some of the “heavy lifting” as a managed service.

“If people don’t want the monetary commitment of a full platform, but might need this capability, they can outsource it to us. You may only need it once a year. It’s like an insurance policy,” Nicholson says. “For example, in the event of layoffs, staff holidays, maternity leave, or to cope with a sudden rise in data notifications—any circumstance where you might be concerned that you don’t have enough hands on deck. … Often, we’ll hear potential clients say, ‘We had a risk situation where a data notification fell through the safety net and caused an issue’—so it might be that they need that independent view once a year or once a quarter.”

To use the service, clients would agree to a service agreement in advance—to save time and avoid repeating the procurement process at the time when the firm urgently needs it—and provide their usage reports detailing the instruments that could affect their systems, then choose the types of reports they want to receive, and when they want to receive them.

“We’re still fleshing out exactly what kind of reports we’ll offer with WISE, but we know it has to be affordable, flexible, and we have to be able to offer it now,” Nicholson says.