Tech Mahindra Ltd., a leading provider of data services to the global financial services industry, today announces that it has signed an agreement with UBS Fund Services (Luxembourg) (UBS FSL) as the first client for its new platform, Tech Mahindra Managed Data Services (MDS), designed to support asset managers, wealth managers, investment banks, custodians and administrators. The contract is for an initial five-year term.

Under the agreement Tech Mahindra will provide UBS FSL with a fully managed service across four major areas of data management, namely securities reference data, pricing, corporate actions and tax data. Tech Mahindra MDS supports the complete data lifecycle of sourcing, cleansing, enrichment and distribution to multiple locations. It also provides ‘golden copy’ creation to underpin a centralized global operating model. The platform supports multiple pricing points across all time zones, markets and asset types.

“The process of managing securities data and pricing has evolved towards platform-based offerings. Forward-thinking financial institutions are increasingly looking to acquire those services from best-in-class service providers”, says Pierre-Antoine Boulat, Chief Executive Officer, UBS FSL. “By leveraging the Tech Mahindra MDS platform, we can achieve substantial cost savings and process efficiencies while maintaining our focus on delivering high quality services to our fund administration clients.”

“Many of the functions that we will perform are continuously repeated not only within organizations but also across the financial markets in general. This repetition is an unnecessary cost and the industry is significantly overpaying for what should be a commoditised function” says Navin Kumar, Operations Head for Managed Data Services, Tech Mahindra.

“Standard industry wisdom is that the total cost of ownership of market data is between three and five times the licence fees. From our own experience, we know that ratio can be much higher and is in some cases as much as ten times the license fee. The challenge for investment firms is pinpointing these costs, as the information is usually lost across processes, jurisdictions and entities” says Jonathan Clark, Head of Financial Services, Tech Mahindra.

Tech Mahindra MDS offers a proven offshore facility, established connections to all the major data vendors, fully operational capability and, with UBS FSL on board, a leading global client already committed.