Former BT trading room solutions Global Account Director appointed to drive adoption of Ontology’s Semantic Search solutions for Risk Data Aggregation and Risk Reporting as well as Transaction Reconstruction for Dodd-Frank Compliance

London, UK – February 14th, 2013: Ontology Systems, the semantic search company for structured enterprise application data, announces the launch of its first two semantic search solutions for the financial services industry, and the appointment of Andrea Harding to lead adoption of the solutions into the sector.

In 2013 the Financial Stability Board (FSB) are asking all Global Systemically Important Banks (G-SIBs) to develop strong Risk Data Aggregation and Risk Reporting capabilities, in line with the Basel Committee on Supervision (BCBS) principles, for the gathering and processing of risk data to enable banks to measure their performance against their risk tolerances. This represents a major challenge for financial institutions; caused by dependencies that exist in many data silos between complex instruments, agreements and contracts to market impacting events, traditional data integration approaches struggle to analyse the complex dependencies across multiple source systems, to provide with a complete understanding of risk exposure.

The Dodd-Frank Act presents a considerable challenge for financial institutions. In 2013 all swap dealers and major swap participants will be required to demonstrate an action plan to maintain a complete audit trail of all a swap trade related communications to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). This will necessitate the recording, indexing, and alignment of SMS text messages, instant messages, emails, documents, mobile, fixed and private line calls and all other communications covered by the legislation.

“Ontology has been applying semantic search to disparate datasets for many years, removing the need for expensive data integration projects,” said Benedict Enweani, CEO and founder of Ontology Systems. “Using semantic search, Ontology is able to link data from enterprise systems that were never designed to be integrated. By indexing and relating different communications or trade components into a searchable graph, Ontology users can reconstruct the communications behind a  trade or see real-time dependencies that affect trade positions, all without traditional integration.”

Both Transaction Reconstruction and Risk Data Aggregation and Risk Reporting solutions are available with immediate effect.

Commenting on the appointment of Andrea Harding, Enweani said: "We are delighted to have Andrea join us at Ontology at this exciting time and her extensive experience and insight will help drive the adoption of semantics within the financial services industry. She is a vastly experienced sales professional with an outstanding track record within the global banking and financial markets. With our semantic search solutions already adopted and proven within the communications industry, we are seeking to show we are a perfect fit for the complex and disparate datasets in the financial service industry, too.”

Harding brings a wealth of knowledge and industry experience to Ontology having most recently worked as a Global Account Director with BT Global Banking & Financial Markets on the Trading Room Solutions team since 2005.

Based in Ontology’s London headquarters, Harding’s appointment was effective from the start of this February 2013.