About our customer

 
Solactive is a Germany-based index provider for the finance industry operating globally. The company develops, calculates, and markets cost-efficient indices over several asset classes, including equity, fixed-income, and commodity indices. Solactive also engages in the development and branding of complex strategies, which are not based on traditional underlyings such as stocks and bonds, but instruments like funds, life insurance products, or basket of currencies.
 

Key facts & figures:

USD 250 bn invested in linked products

500+ customers around the world

300+ employees

Presence in Frankfurt, Dresden, Berlin, Toronto and Hong-Kong, and expanding.

Context

 
The most critical asset in index engineering is data, and Solactive’s expertise relies on huge volumes of transparent and accurate information. The company must drill down from raw datasets to specific data points that will be used to create the best possible financial indices. To do this, Solactive takes a step-by-step approach, deriving the right data points with the right values from the raw datasets. Hence, the resulting standard processed datasets can be leveraged by business users, such as product development or index management teams.
 

Challenge

 
The datasets used by Solactive to generate its financial indexes are provided by a variety of data vendors (e.g. Reuters, Bloomberg, etc.), all of which provide the same information (data points) that can have different values. It is therefore crucial, when calculating an index, to exploit the right data point, i.e. all members of the organization must exploit the same common value. Indeed, with significant investments at stake, an unbalanced index can immediately result in a significant loss for Solactive’s clients and its clients’ clients.

As a result, Solactive was looking for a specific solution to access key information about these datasets from these different sources without having to make it available to all business users. The company therefore needed a solution that could answer these three strategic questions – both from an organizational and technical perspective – to better understand and know its data landscape:
 

1. Data Transparency:
   What data did they actually have? From which source did they come from? Where were they located? How could they easily access them?
2. Data Governance:
   Who had access to the data? How was the quality of the data ensured? What measures were in place (security, architecture, integrations, etc.)?
3. Data Consumption:
   Who were the data consumers? What data points were actually being consumed or licensed?

Solution

 
Solactive chose Zeenea’s data catalog to understand and know better its data landscape, providing the necessary transparency, governance, and consumption information for each data point. By centralizing the enterprise’s metadata into a single source of truth, Zeenea enables Solactive to better collaborate on its information assets and maximize the value of its data:
 

Documentation and communication of data quality: The different quality levels and stages associated with each dataset are available to all users in the enterprise. For example, business and data analysts can easily find the right data point in a specific dataset via key information displayed in the catalog.

Management of access to datasets: The data catalog contributes to effective data governance. For example, to ensure that product development and data science teams cannot access raw datasets.

Reduction of costs: The data catalog allows business users to see which datasets are licensed and which are not, and from which vendor. In fact, it is not necessary to license all of them, as not all will be used in the index creation process.

Facilitation and shortening of the licensing process: Business users can take advantage of Zeenea’s powerful search engine to find the specific data they need from among millions of data points. Once they have identified the information they need, they go to the vendor to request a license for specific data points. This way, they can process the datasets and document them in the data catalog so they can be safely consumed in the future.

Solactive’s journey with Zeenea

 
Solactive began its journey with Zeenea in 2022 after a thorough benchmarking of all data catalog solutions on the market. The company chose Zeenea over its competitors for the following reasons:
 

All datasets are stored in the cloud,

It is possible to generate a lot of metadata to differentiate data points,

Zeenea provides a Google search like experience with many results that are more relevant and targeted compared to other solutions tested,

The Zeenea team is helpful and understands Solactive’s specific challenges and needs, which are very specific to their business. Most of the other solutions were more technology focused and did not understand the business,

The implementation was easy: within two months, Solactive achieved transparency for all of its datasets.