Cicada is a privately-held corporation, with a global presence in New York, London, Oklahoma City and Hong Kong. The company was founded in 1998 by a core group of executives with extensive careers in the financial information industry. Cicada’s first major product development for the financial markets was a data management platform designed for processing real-time market data, called Cicada Composer®. Initially, Cicada focused its efforts on the exchange and data vendor market, promoting the technology as a solution to help these organizations better manage and distribute market data and, as a result, meet the goals of their data business strategies.

Later, as the financial markets began to see the negative effects of poor reference data quality and availability on business processes throughout the industry, Cicada saw an opportunity to offer another solution to the market. Broadly speaking, reference data is considered to be descriptive data on instruments, issuers and counterparties that is used for trading and settlement. Market data, on the other hand, generally refers to pricing data, primarily that delivered from exchanges to the markets in real-time. In the market’s early efforts to achieve straight-through processing of trades and other transactions, it became clear that many trades were failing due to poor or missing reference data. It was not long before institutions began to see how critical reference data quality is for processes throughout their organizations, in addition to trading and settlement. To address this pressing problem, Cicada added a host of major new functionalities and facilities to its data management platform, specifically for the effective and efficient management of reference data quality. This new data management engine was launched as Cicada Composer® plus+.

In more recent years, as pressure from investors and regulators has caused financial institutions to implement better risk management systems and tighter controls, interest in reference data and data management processes has continued to grow. Now, as organizations must also comply with anti-money laundering, “know your customer” and a range of other regulatory initiatives and requirements, Cicada has again responded.

The management of customer data is one area that has been greatly affected by the wave of regulations. For example, anti-money laundering (AML) legislation in jurisdictions across the globe (such as the Patriot Act in the US and the Know Your Customer initiatives in the UK), require that financial institutions verify the identity of their customers and gather prescribed documentation based on each customer’s risk profile. The institution must have in place a documented, transparent process for managing customer information, conducting compliance reviews and providing regulators with required information. These activities present a significant burden to many financial institutions. In November 2005, Cicada launched its Cicada Profiler™ software, a point solution for managing the specific customer data due diligence activities associated with regulatory requirements.

Leveraging the flexibility and proven functionality of its core data management technology, Cicada today continues to add new point solutions to its product line.