ComplyPlus and Data
At the heart of every computer system is its data.  Data comes from three distinct sources: trading systems and/or accounting systems, trade record data (FIX, etc.) and reference data such as that from Bloomberg, Morningstar and Thomson.  Integrating your data with ComplyPlus is relatively straight forward.  You do not have to "reformat" your data into our internal format, instead we can use your data in much the same way as Microsoft Excel and Access do.  The degree to which you can integrate your trading system depends on your particular system.  For instance, some trading systems are "open" enough to include a compliance check at the time of order allocation.  Call us for more details about how ComplyPlus integrates with your specific order management/trading system.

Many firms don't have the budget for extensive data feeds to support compliance.  For instance, you might not have a data feed to supply industry breakdowns for iShares (Index Shares).  Without this data, ComplyPlus can't do the "look through" for this class of asset. However, ComplyPlus was designed to handle situations where data is missing.  For example, you can build rules that take into account the missing data and calculate its potential effect by each rule.

Data Overlays
Another problem with data is that it's often incorrect.  In some cases, data may be correct for some purposes, but incorrect for others.  A simple example: You're managing the money for the local chapter of the Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Union. They want to buy only US securities.  As part of their account setup, you added a client restriction that stops purchasing of foreign equities. However, you want to buy stock from the disk drive manufacturer Seagate Technology (STX), based out of California, on behalf of this client.  But Seagate has recently moved its legal domicile to the Cayman Islands for tax reasons.  Is Seagate a U.S. company or a foreign company?  The data you get from your provider says "Cayman".  You call your client and ask how they want to consider Seagate?  They give you the green light to consider purchasing Seagate.

Many such data items are left to interpretation.  There is no easy right or wrong answer; but your data provider has only a single value. And, of course, there are times when the data is simply wrong.  So what do you do with Seagate? Override the error when you place the trade (this is how most systems handle these kinds of problems today)?  Another way would be to change the rule to exclude Seagate from testing.  This is messy; now you've taken your "no foreign" rule that was good for any account and made it specific to the Electrical Workers Union. ComplyPlus provides you another way: data overlays.

With ComplyPlus' data overlay system, you can change the value from the data provider and limit the context in which the change is visible.  As in the previous example, ComplyPlus would allow you to create an overlay for the Seagate domicile data item and apply it to that specific account and that specific rule.  Or in the case of a real data quality problem, you could apply the change across all clients/portfolios and all rules. After all, when you get a data quality problem from Bloomberg, who are going to call to fix it?

Any data item in ComplyPlus, including data provided from third parties can be overlaid allowing different interpretations by client, portfolio or rule. You can setup the overlay to work for a specific time period. For instance, you can override a credit rating, but only for the next month. And, you can detect when the source system changes its value so you can decide what to do in response. Again, using the Seagate example, what should happen when Seagate's domicile changes from Cayman to Bermuda, should the overlay still override with USA? ComplyPlus provides you with the tools to work with the data you have.

Global Table Manager
ComplyPlus ships with a powerful data manager called the Global Table Manager.  It provides in-memory data storage for high-performance data access.  It can load data from wide variety of data sources such as a web services, xml, Excel, flat-files, databases, and much more.  It also provides services for indexing and data table relations common with most relational databases today. It provides the unique feature that it can link data to an individual ComplyPlus object such as portfolios, stocks, bonds, etc., in much the same way a relational databases links (joins) tables.  All the data in the Global Table Manager can be used as part of rule definition without having to perform any SQL statements. And it's fast because all the data is in-memory and fully indexed.

Grouping Manager
ComplyPlus ships with a tool called the Grouping Manager which is used to create lists and trees for use with rules.  Simple lists can be created to support rules such as exclusion tests.  More complex tree structures can be created to support rules for aggregation.  A simple example is a tree that contains all the countries in the world (bottom of the tree) that rolls up to various geographic regions (at the top of the tree).  By introducing this tree into a rule, you can build rules that aggregate by geographic region even though your data only has country information.

Data AddIns 
Another way data is provided in ComplyPlus is from a custom AddIn.  As an example, ComplyPlus ships with an AddIn that provides real-time pricing information.  Another example is a ComplyPlus AddIn that provides bond ratings.  ComplyPlus' AddIn capability goes beyond the functionality of the Global Table Manager by allowing complex functionality as well as integration of data into ComplyPlus' rule libraries.  ComplyPlus ships with sample source code for several Addins that can be used as templates for your IT department for creation of your own custom AddIn.