Data inconsistencies cause differences in automated negotiation behaviour
between electronic market venues
Electronic trading systems, by the nature of the way they have grown organically, have resulted in a landscape which means that there is not always the time to consider the abstraction of the core data pertinent to the electronic market venues into a unified form. Financial instruments, customers and their categorisations, and sometimes the inquiry negotiation behaviour rules, are often maintained separately but in parallel for each of the market connectivity components.

It is hard work to try to maintain the same configurations across a number of electronic market venues in parallel. Data errors, inconsistencies and 'clutter' are often introduced as a result over time. This of course causes inconsistent behaviour when it comes to the automated negotiation of customer activity.

Functional inconsistencies cause problems for management reporting and feedback
Electronic trading activity often has slightly varying functionality, structure and data values depending on the market connectivity solution and market in question, even for the same class of instruments. In addition, different technical solutions are adopted by different regions in a multi-region, multi-instrument-class environment found within many banks. It is hard to abstract all of this into a unified representation, and time/resource constraints and the pressure to deliver new functionality means the problem often cannot be addressed.

This compounds the situation which may already exist caused by inconsistencies in basic data across markets such as instruments and customers. Hence management feedback and reports are difficult to understand and need further manual interpretation, and are often simply inaccurate.