By Barry Eitel
SAN FRANCISCO
JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are creating a joint pool of listed-products data, according to a report filed by The Wall Street Journal late on Wednesday.
The three banks, the largest investment banks in the U.S., are to start a new company which will implement the data bank, according to the report. The data bank will be created by SmartStream Technologies, a global software and managed services provider which works with many of the largest banks in the world.
The pool will at first include data on listed derivatives and equities, with data on fixed-income securities to be added later.
Each founding bank is investing "seven figures," sources familiar with the plan told The Wall Street Journal.
The name for the initiative is "SPReD", an acronym for Securities Product Reference Data. The WSJ reports that the banks plan to publicly launch the company within the next year.
The data pool is to maintain "cleaned" data, that is, data which is in a form that can be used in applications. Unstructured data has to be put into usable form before it can be processed. By maintaining a large pool of "cleaned" data, the banks will create a rich resource for pricing and trend information.
Cyber-security could prove to be another hurdle for the initiative. JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley have all been the victims of data breaches since July of 2014. A hacking against Chase last year compromised 83 million accounts, making it one of the largest corporate cyberattacks in history. Transferring sensitive data to a separate company could open up new windows for hackers.
