Chapter 3: A Smarter Data Ontology at the Core

By Larry Bajek, Vice President, Strategic Wealth Solutions

In the ever-changing asset servicing landscape, fragmentation remains a constant. Particularly as bank and broker-dealer enterprises expand across borders and businesses, the amalgamation of disparate systems, datasets, and experiences increases. Without a unified approach, tasks such as normalizing data, harmonizing workflows, and presenting insights coherently across business units and functions—especially with the integration of AI—become progressively more difficult.

At Broadridge, we are addressing fragmentation with our Global Asset Servicing Platform, powered by a single, unified data source called BRx. This transformation goes beyond merely consolidating solutions and standardizing data patterns. The most exciting aspect is the cumulative value that emerges from uniting previously disconnected data sets.

New opportunities for interconnected intelligence

With a single platform, now we can identify how a pool of data from one function could inject a new level of intelligence or efficiency into another. For example, data on a company’s strategy and decision-making from a proxy system could enrich corporate actions communications, while tax-efficient insights could help advisors and investors optimize investment strategies. Opportunities to create value all stem from the unified data set driven by BRx’s common data ontology.

Our data ontology’s design principles

In order to unify functions and datasets across the entire asset servicing lifecycle with a single data ontology, we have embraced three key principles in designing BRx:

1. Agnostic aggregation and abstraction

2. Modular and cumulative data-banking

3. User-first views and experiences

Let’s explore each principle in more detail.

The foundational concept of BRx is its agnostic approach, which applies from the aggregation of data source inputs to the abstraction of data outputs for any and all users. BRx provides comprehensive coverage across all aspects of the asset servicing lifecycle, including capital markets, global custody, asset management, and wealth management. It can ingest and normalize diverse datasets, from post-trade processing to books and records and market data.

This approach is transformative, as it eliminates the typical challenges of integrating disparate data, solutions, functions, and partners by standardizing the data model, regardless of the data’s origin or destination. BRx is agnostic in several ways:

• Product-agnostic: BRx is independent of any single application, ensuring independent, unbiased views and best-of-breed semantics
• Database-agnostic: A wide choice of relational and NoSQL persistence allows more flexibility in licensing choice (e.g., Snowflake, PostgreSQL)
• ETL layer-agnostic: BRx has no dependency on specific underlying translation/mapping tools, or expression of the model (XML, J-SON etc.)
• Transport-agnostic: Clients have the flexibility to choose their preferred queuing technologies (e.g., Kafka, Amazon SQS, IBM Websphere, Active MQ, AMQP)

BRx’s agnostic design simplifies a great deal of underlying complexity, offering clients the ease and flexibility of a single gateway into the platform—regardless of their chosen entry point. A unified client experience and API-driven architecture provides easy integration of and access to internal applications, Broadridge solutions, and third-party offerings.

Another key design principle of BRx is its modular and cumulative data-banking approach, which delivers maximum flexibility and scalability. Clients can choose their entry point, from our full range of end-to-end asset servicing capabilities, wherever their highest priority lies. Our single gateway allows them to implement once and then easily activate new solutions as needed.

Over time, each additional module adds incrementally to a harmonized golden data set across the client’s business, helping them realize cumulative benefits. Our data ontology is intentionally more targeted in scope than others, focusing only on business outcome data—the elements that move between systems. Each new batch of data is automatically integrated into all relevant back- and front-office systems, becoming immediately available across applications in real time. Common data points are re-used to enhance efficiency and value, while the prime copy becomes increasingly comprehensive and valuable as new capabilities and datasets are added.

Designed to grow with your business, BRx scales seamlessly to accommodate increasing data volumes and transaction loads, ensuring consistent performance and reliability as your needs evolve.

The final principle shaping BRx is its emphasis on user-first views and experiences. Different business teams have unique end clients that dictate their specific workflow data views requirements. Therefore, it is essential to integrate the right curation and presentation patterns into the data architecture. Traditionally, most firms recreate the same basic underlying data set for each team, building or purchasing disparate applications to manage it—leading to fragmentation. Now, with BRx, firms can use an underlying common layer of harmonized data, with user-tailored views and workflows on top of and drawing from it.

Data becomes a powerful enabler for better user experiences across operations teams, executive managers, advisors, and end investors. In developing our Global Asset Servicing Platform, we have focused on delivering functional benefits such real-time risk management and streamlined workflows as well as modern user experiences and interfaces.

This cutting-edge data visualization reduces risk by enhancing transparency, agility, and control, allowing users to quickly detect and correct issues. It also lowers costs by enabling the ability to track trends, measure progress, present KPIs, and elevate performance.

For more details on how our platform delivers user-centric benefits across client enterprises, revisit Chapter 2 of this series: Powering Efficiency and Growth from End-to-End.

Our platform is unique in its ability to create configurable, persona-specific dashboards that centralize important information from multiple systems. For example, our Operations Console presents a streamlined central view where tasks are gathered, presented, and prioritized, empowering clients to optimize their processes.

This cutting-edge data visualization reduces risk by enhancing transparency, agility, and control, allowing users to quickly detect and correct issues. It also lowers costs by enabling the ability to track trends, measure progress, present KPIs, and elevate performance.

For more details on how our platform delivers user-centric benefits across client enterprises, revisit Chapter 2 of this series: Powering Efficiency and Growth from End-to-End.

In conclusion

At Broadridge, we’re bringing a bold new vision of asset servicing to life, with our modular, end-to-end platform that’s built on BRx: a smarter, single data ontology at the core. BRx serves as the foundational engine of our Global Asset Servicing Platform, providing the single gateway flexibility and future-proof scalability our clients require across Data, Corporate Actions, Income, Proxy, Reporting and beyond.

Through this article series, we have demonstrated how a unified platform and mutualization of processes can solve pervasive asset servicing challenges, by dismantling silos, eliminating manual inefficiencies, and enhancing interoperability. Our Global Asset Servicing Platform powers seamless integration, automation, and AI-driven insights, ultimately reshaping the future of our industry.

The Future of Asset Servicing Is Now: Unified, Scalable, and Efficient

The switch is on. Industry leaders are adopting a straight-through, single platform model across the full asset servicing lifecycle. As a longstanding partner to leading banks and broker-dealers, Broadridge brings deep industry expertise, and our harmonizing Global Asset Servicing Platform can help you plan a successful, modular transformation on your terms in an increasingly demanding digital and data-driven environment.

Learn more about our reimagined Global Asset Servicing Platform