AC Plus Modules

Investment data is the lifeblood of any capital markets operation. It runs through virtually every operation, every application, and every analytic decision-support function, current and future. AC Plus is designed to support the data quality process from acquiring raw data—through normalization, consolidation and data enrichment, down to publishing—in a fully auditable, robust and scalable fashion.

AC Plus consists of the following components that work together in an integrated environment.

AC Server contains the core functionality to process and store time-series and reference data. The AC Server can run on a single box or on clustered hardware.  Data Consumption and distribution takes place through APIs, notification and replication.  AC Plus also includes an integration framework to provide integration with messaging, EJB applications, and JMS-compliant products such as MQSeries.  AC Plus' integration framework is hosted in a J2EE.14 compatible application server, such as JBoss, WebSphere and Weblogic.

AC Data Vendor Interfaces process and represent data from data vendors. AC Plus provides a large set of standard interfaces to all of the major data vendors, with continual enhancements for supported feeds. AC Plus provides interfaces with off-the-shelf data models and connectors to source real-time data, and a common platform allowing for vendor data processing in parallel.

AC Data Logic comprises the business logic related to the further processing and storage of data. It contains a comprehensive and common securities, issuer and corporate actions data model to which vendor data is mapped using libraries containing thousands of mapping rules to standardize content and to normalize data for comparison and consolidation. Combined with AC Plus’ rich data model, comprehensive library of interfaces and workflow capabilities, it ensures ease of data control for processes such as valuation, risk management, settlement and custody.

AC Data Analyzer scripting language offers standard functions for data manipulation as well as standard business rules for suspect detection, for example.

AC Desktop is designed to bring control of the data management process from IT operations closer to the business consumers who best understand the data and its uses in the organization. It contains a host of modules for data administration functions, data viewing and manipulation functions. It also provides workflow functionality associated with data cleansing and data enrichment.

AC Surveyor is a Web-based solution that provides users with access to and analysis of financial market data. It is a combined user tool and development environment that enables firms to customize and adapt services to the specific business role, data usage and functional requirement of any user.

AC Contour is an analytic tool that helps risk managers convert data into curves, surfaces and matrices. It is a combined user tool and development environment to provide maximum flexibility in leveraging data.

AC COM provides an Excel add-in that enables the retrieval of AC Plus data into Excel, including security master, corporate actions, pricing and curve data. It also allows for data to be committed back into AC Plus from Excel so that for example traders, market makers and research staff can directly plug into Excel.