Connection Points

For Richard Petti, who took over as chief executive officer of financial data management systems and services provider Asset Control in October, the mission for the company isn’t to make drastic changes to what it does, but rather to make the use of its products a better experience and guide its offerings toward a services approach, not a product-based one.

“For our existing customers, our job is to work on the user experience and making the product lighter, more interesting and easier to use,” says Petti. “Our products are strategic, enterprise tools and very specific in what they do. We always concentrated very heavily on the inside of the products. I want to also place some emphasis ... on getting the users to enjoy the product as much as we do.”

Petti became CEO following the August acquisition of Asset Control by Marlin Equity Partners, the Los Angeles area-based global private equity firm, from the previous owner, Fidelity Ventures. Working with two main products, Asset Control Plus (AC Plus) and AC Express, a newer offering geared toward buy-side users, Petti plans to begin 2014 with what he calls a “360-degree approach” to upgrading and implementing AC Plus and AC Express.

The managed service environment Petti envisions will allow users to manage the use of AC Plus or AC Express in-house and take ownership over their functions. “It’s giving the service back to the customer,” he says, “or even placing our products in some kind of ASP or outsourced environment.”

Responding to Users

There certainly will be challenges in implementing Petti’s “360-degree approach,” which he acknowledges. “Traditionally, our product has been a very technical sale,” he says. “It’s been presented as a very powerful technology suite sold to a highly literate technical user community. This meant the product was then taken on board and owned by the customer. Customers spent a lot of time customizing it and integrating it the way they want.”

This method of working with users of data management systems used to be common and accepted practice, according to Petti, but with users pushing for greater return on investment and less product uncertainty, changes became necessary, he says. “It was seen as an opportunity for in-house staff to do it better and faster. With much more attention now on the outcome of IT budgets, people want no uncertainty.”

In response, for Asset Control’s new approach, Petti explains, the company has to understand user requirements from the start, recommend best practices, issue service-level agreements about the performance of AC Plus and AC Express. “It’s making sure there are guaranteed outcomes for implementation and after we go live as well,” he says.

Defining Logistics

Petti sees Asset Control’s services as having a central place for tracking and administering pricing and valuations, profit and loss data, management of risk, balance sheets and audits. The term “data logistics” describes a central part of data management and information systems supporting those business functions. Data logistics, in Petti’s view, means understanding the sourcing of data, and how data needs to be transformed and then normalized for audits and traceability.

“Data logistics is becoming a pillar that banks need control of for security and certainty over the financial positions they report and decisions they make,” he says. “‘Data logistics’ actually describes what we do much better and how our technology is deployed. In industry, ‘logistics’ evokes a series of points connected to other points. For financial data, this is not a linear sequence. It’s multi-point to multi-point. But ‘logistics’ nevertheless describes it, because you are connecting points.”

Petti also sees logistics as including “transformation and delivery” of data. “We think of ourselves as a transformation and delivery middleware,” he says. “Data comes in, we combine it, normalize it and push it out. What matters is the output, the golden copy. Everything that happened to get to that point is important for transparency and evidencing that’s what happened, but the end-of-day rate or security definition that is issued to the downstream system is the record that matters. Understanding logistics and data management gives a better understanding of how to mold the process, the controls and the governance—how you give the customer confidence that this is under control.”