Centralized Data Hub for Information and Reporting for the Investment Management Division, Unite ...

The United Nations Joint Staff Pension Fund (“UNJSPF”) established by the General Assembly of the United Nations (“UN”) provides retirement, death, disability and related benefits for UN Staff and other international intergovernmental organizations admitted to membership in the Fund. Most of the Fund’s assets are internally managed with a market value of approximately US$46 billion. Investment in small capitalization companies are outsourced to external managers. Most of the exposure is in major developed markets, the Fund is committed to finding sound investment opportunities in emerging markets The Fund is presently seeking qualified firms to provide services in the following area: The IMD/UNJSPF invested in many state of the art systems to support and enable its investment operations across global markets. The main systems implemented so far include a trade order management, electronic confirmation / matching, back office operation, risk and performance, and SWIFT systems. At this point, all these systems acquire the financial data they need from the market through Bloomberg services. IMD/UNJSPF is looking to centralize the acquisition, the scrubbing / cleansing, and distribution of financial data through one system to ensure its integrity across all IMD/UNJSPF systems. It is also envisaged that this centralized system will provide the capacity to perform some sort of data reconciliation and store historical IMD financial data for reporting and audit purposes. This Request for EOI seeks to define the objectives and requirements for a centralized data hub as well as to provide information on the systems that are involved in the data hub implementation. OBJECTIVES: 1) Data acquisition: to establish a central data hub that can acquire financial data from multiple data sources for different markets. 2) Data Scrubbing and cleansing: to establish a central data hub that has the capacity to scrub and clean the data prior to disseminating it to the down stream systems. The scrubbing rules should be user definable and based on user defined scrubbing criteria (for example provide the mechanism that will enable the users to choose financial instrument pricing according to predefined criteria or rules). 3) Data distribution: to establish a central data hub that will able to distribute seamlessly the same data across various financial applications. The data hub must guarantee that security static and financial data is identical across downstream systems and clearly identify discrepancies. 4) The data hub should have built-in out of the box customizable interfaces with major financial industry market data systems such as Bloomberg (upstream); and also preferably with Charles River Trading System (downstream). 5) Provide the ability to built smart interfaces between IMD systems and enable two-way data flows with built-in data exchanged reconciliation, security and hand-check. 6) The data hub must have the ability to store historical financial data of the IMD. It should also provide extensive audit reporting capabilities.