ST1901

CASE STUDY: CASE STUDY: EURONEXT
"We can set up an environment for a data scientist in less than one day, compared to
the 40 days it used to take, and we have moved from D+1 analytics to real-time
analytics. This is fundamental to understanding markets, clients, competitors, and how
they interact."
that cause high volumes on the markets."
Still, the transition to a Platform as a Service
(PaaS) does require one key condition:
remaining independent of the cloud provider.
"The core of the data lake is managed by
Talend. It was very important for us to keep
this 'independence' compared to the layers
below Talend. So, if tomorrow Euronext wants
to change clouds, they can," says the CDO,
happy about the greater flexibility. Euronext
chose Talend Big Data to absorb real-time
data in the data lake, including internal data
from its own trading platform; and external
data, such as from Reuters and Bloomberg.
In an ultra-regulated world, Talend has also
proven to be highly adept at meeting the
challenges of data lake governance and
regulatory compliance. Being able to safely
open data involves knowing it inside out,
keeping track of changes and the history of
data feeds, and knowing how to classify them
in a granular structure.
This governance strategy is applied in very
specific tools, such as the Talend Data
Catalog. A dictionary is created together with
each technical project for each individual
market. These dictionaries are used to find the
history of end-to-end data, from the sources
to the reporting.
"Now I can see when S3 is the data source, I
can add value to the data, combine it with
other data, and convert it into other data in
Redshift," says Belarfaoui, who is very satisfied
with the new process. "I can also add tags.
Typically, we add the storage duration. For
example, whether data has to be kept for ten
years, or five years (per MIFID II), or if it
should be archived."
At the same time, data lineage with Talend
drastically reduces impact analysis costs. "One
simple example comes to mind: we plan to
change the value of an index on the British
stock market. Once we integrate it into our
systems, it propagates itself pretty much
everywhere. Currently we have to figure 200
person-days just to find the index in our
different systems. But with the dictionary, we are
able to run this data lineage with just one click."
MONETIZING STOCK MARKET DATA
Two years after its launch, the governed lake
project with Talend and AWS is a success.
"The initial returns are more than positive,"
says Belarfaoui. "On the technical side, we
can manage ten times more iso-budget data."
Beyond the improved architecture, the
migration is also positioning Euronext to
become a "data trader." The stock market
operator wanted to be able to refine and add
to its wealth of data in order to monetize it. In
fact, the sale of data already brings in 20% of
Euronext's revenues.
"Traders actually sell, buy, and make their
investment decisions in milliseconds. They
have a huge appetite for aggregated data in
real time. Who sells which stock, to whom, at
what price and when. We are in the best
position to track performance of the CAC 40
or other indexes and sell that information to
investors through our Datashop platform,"
says Belarfaoui.
In addition to clients, this project also
involves giving data scientists and business
units self-service access to this data, which
they can analyse in data sandboxes for tasks
such as market monitoring. Belarfaoui
explains: "We can set up an environment for a
data scientist in less than one day, compared
to the 40 days it used to take, and we have
moved from D+1 analytics to real-time
analytics. This is fundamental to
understanding markets, clients, competitors,
and how they interact."
This is a real turning point for Euronext. "In
2016, we identified the need, but we didn't
have the capacity to do it. At the time, we
could only relay the volumes of market activity
to market regulators (Mifid II). Today, we can
dig deeper. Under the General Data Protection
Regulation (GDPR), I have to know where
personal data is stored. If I receive requests for
modification or deletion, I can find the data,
thanks to the dictionary," elaborates Belarfaoui.
"Similarly, a user who searches a transaction
can instantly see if it is confidential. Once data
is identified as being critical, the data steward
can deny user access."
Euronext is just at the beginning of its digital
transformation. A study is currently underway
on the deployment of Talend's Master Data
Management (MDM) solution. "We are
working on 'golden sources' within all of our
systems (CRM, trading, billing, finance,
various departments, subsidiaries, etc.). The
goal is to make all Euronext data even cleaner
and of higher quality, such as by being sure
that a client is consistently represented across
all systems. Such standards will make our
data even more usable," predicts Belarfaoui.
More info: www.talend.com
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Jan/Feb 2019
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