AFTAs 2017: Most Innovative Third-Party Technology Vendor—Infrastructure—UnaVista

Given the LSEG’s heavily regulated nature as a primary market operator across multiple geographies and jurisdictions, UnaVista occupies something of a niche among its peers, being able to use its parent’s global reach and expertise to deliver the necessary reporting functionality required by its clients. With major regulations such as Mifid II/Mifir and the Market Abuse Regulation (MAR) in Europe and Dodd-Frank and the Consolidated Audit Trail (CAT) to contend with in the US, UnaVista’s combination of insight and technology solutions puts it head and shoulders above its competitors. The UnaVista platform is driven by LSEG’s vast data repository allowing it to provide comprehensive data analysis, peer-to-peer benchmarking, and surveillance functionality through a single interface, supported by a dynamic data model that integrates client proprietary data structures that helps speed up the onboarding process.

Much of the work undertaken by UnaVista over the past 12 months has focused on readying its Mifir reporting capabilities and it has utilized that experience to release a new tool to replicate the reporting and data requirements of the CAT, which will allow US broker-dealers to simulate the requirements of the initiative by inputting data into the UnaVista system, which is then compared against the specifications or guidance that the vendor has received from the relevant US competent authorities. UnaVista has also teamed up with fellow LSEG subsidiary MTS, a European electronic fixed-income trading market, to develop a new reporting solution for the Securities Financing Transactions Regulation (SFTR), which is expected to go live in 2019. The collaboration will provide a single solution for the trading and reporting of securities financing transactions with front-to-back reporting of Unique Transaction Identifiers (UTIs), timestamps, ISINs and other product identifiers required by the regulation.

Outside of the regulatory sphere, UnaVista is also involved in a number of LSEG technology projects, further enhancing its offering within the LSEG cloud infrastructure, allowing the platform to scale to greater levels when introducing new products and services to other regions, and adding new data display and analysis tools to its platform.