Best Supporting Services Provider: Axon Financial Systems

With ever-increasing complexity in pricing structures and policies, understanding where data goes once it has entered an organization is essential to remaining compliant and avoiding excessive fees. Axon Financial Systems—as the winner of the Best Supporting Services Provider award this year—takes this role beyond consultancy and delivers to clients the technology needed to take the issue into their own hands. 

In the past four years, Axon Financial Systems has focused on developing products that can help firms understand market data compliance and usage, and at the heart of its offering is the PEAR (Policies, Explanations Analysis Reporting) platform—an online exchange compliance database that brings together more than 160 exchange data policies. Steve Cowler, COO and co-founder of Axon, says: “What makes ours different to the current approach is that we’re technology-driven. For the majority of the time, our business model removes the need for us to place personnel at a customer site.”

While market data administration can be manually intensive, Axon clients can use PEAR as a self‑service portal to access and query data. “The Axon platform is built on a knowledge base of rules and regulations around which a robust database schema has been designed and built,” says Aaron Garforth, CIO and co‑founder of Axon. The offering is designed to take the complexity out of market data administration and improve efficiencies by ensuring policies are in a standardized format using a common language.

Axon’s Declaration Service (ADS) can help replace repetitive processes for preparing exchange and vendor declarations. By leveraging the standardized data in PEAR, Axon allows customers to automate market data reporting. Axon also released the Application Compliance Tool (ACT) earlier this year. “ACT is there to help customers manage their market data application universe,” says Garforth, explaining that this tool also leverages PEAR and helps clients identify licensing and policy requirements impacting compliance obligations for applications.

Judges praised Axon for its “good solution that solves a multitude of issues and gives clients a comprehensive view of the data they are consuming and sending outside of their firms.”

The solution will be further enhanced later this year when Axon releases a public application programming interface (API). Axon’s CEO and co‑founder, Chris Hutton, says it is developing an API so customers can use the knowledge base electronically. Designed to help customers with internal workflow, it is set to increase the value-add for other vendors too. “We’re also working with market data inventory companies,” he says. They can use data from PEAR to crossmatch exchange policy updates, for example, and this process can be automated with the help of the API.

Read more about the IMD/IRD Awards 2018 winners