Brian Sentance is CEO at Xenomorph, a provider of analytics and data-management services.

What were the major themes of your business in 2014?

Improving data quality for risk and regulatory reporting has been a major theme across many of our clients. Whilst the BCBS239 regulatory principles are aimed directly at banks, their influence extends across all financial institutions. As such, it is great to see that the regulators exert a strong influence for stronger data management in the industry, complemented by industry initiatives such as FIBO and DCAM from the EDM Council.

Related to data quality, having the necessary workflow to manage multi-layered validation of data has been an area that clients have been pushing for. The challenge here is that a single piece of data may have more than one “context”, needing to be validated in itself, its history, its peers, its usage in multiple financial objects such as curves and indices for instance. Ensuring consistency and validation completeness needs careful management and is an area where we have expended a lot of effort this year to deliver a complete solution to our clients.

Regulation and competitive pressures are forcing clients to look at streamlining processes, reducing costs and improving operational efficiency across front, middle and back office. Given our origins in decision support in the front office, combined with our solution enhancements around data quality and workflow, Xenomorph has been well positioned to assist our clients in putting together a consistent data management framework that can integrate and enhance all of trading, risk management, reporting and operations.

Industry attitudes towards cloud usage seem to be changing rapidly and this year Xenomorph created a platform for publishing, consuming and partnering around financial markets analytics and data content. This has involved working with Microsoft and their Azure cloud technology, increasing our linkages to Business Intelligence suites such as Power BI, Tableau and MicroStrategy, and partnering with the likes of i2i Logic to bring new and innovative cloud services to market.

What are your expectations for 2015?

We are looking forward to rolling out our new data management functionality to clients, both existing and new. Regulation, cost pressures and new business models will continue as themes in 2015 and Xenomorph is uniquely positioned to help our clients deal with all of these pressures.

2015 will be a year about partners for Xenomorph. Cloud technology in particular lends itself to co-operation, greater efficiency and innovation in my view, and partners will be key in offering new services and solutions to our mutual clients.