Cicada creates risk data management group

Cicada, a US market data distribution systems company, has created a new subsidiary, Cicada Risk, to provide risk data management products. The move marks the company’s first foray into the risk management business.

Cicada’s aim is to repair the irregular quality and unevenness of data in risk management applications used by the buy-side. “The irregularity stems from firms getting data from a myriad of different sources, such as Bloomberg, Reuters and others,” said Hubert Holmes, president of Cicada Risk and formerly chief executive at Cicada.

“Clients at different stages requested a firm with data aggregation technology to normalise data, create custom feeds to specific databases and provide data handling technology to impact the quality of data,” he added. More comprehensive, cleaner and better managed data should resolve some of the “less than perfect outcomes” currently faced by risk managers, claimed Holmes.

Cicada Risk runs on Cicada Composer, a real-time infrastructure system designed to allow financial information owners to combine proprietary, contextual and third-party content from any source. The combined multi-sourced feed is then normalised and indexed. Composer acts as a content master database to filter and restore client-server applications, client proprietary applications, vendors and other distribution venues.

Cicada Risk offers both on-site installations and an outsourced version of the service through its managed data centres. Pricing depends on how many sources clients extract data from and the complexities of the data, said Holmes. For example, fixed-income data is harder to cleanse, and would cost more. Customers pay roughly $25,000 to $250,000 per month, depending on the service.

A large multinational US insurer is likely to become Cicada Risk’s first customer. But Cicada refused to name the firm until the deal is signed. Cicada is also soliciting banks and money managers.