BMO Financial Group Wins American Financial Technology Award

BMO Financial Group (TSX:BMO) (NYSE:BMO) and Xignite, the leading provider of market data cloud solutions, announced today that BMO has implemented Xignite Enterprise, a cloud-based data distribution solution that helps large financial institutions centralize, distribute and optimize access to market and reference data licensed by Bloomberg and other vendors. BMO’s deployment of Xignite Enterprise - dubbed BMO Skyway - was recognized as the industry’s Best Cloud Initiative at the 2014 American Financial Technology Awards ceremony on December 8th, 2014 in New York City.

BMO uses Xignite Enterprise to distribute market data licensed from several vendors throughout the organization using a private, branded on-demand market and reference data cloud. The solution helps BMO reduce market data expenses by eliminating duplicate data usage between departments and across vendors, while also driving accountability and compliance through its embedded entitlement controls and detailed usage tracking metrics. In addition, the data is readily available via REST APIs to help BMO power next-generation initiatives in several strategic areas.

Managing the volume, distribution, reconciliation and compliant use of market data feeds is increasingly becoming a challenge within the capital markets and banking sectors. Market data groups struggle to eliminate data silos and ensure that data is utilized effectively across divisions and departments. At the same time, new initiatives around digital wealth management and other key areas are pushing large financial institutions to look at not only reducing costs, but also increasing the firm’s ability to quickly respond to emerging technologies coming from Silicon Valley and other fast-emerging fintech areas.

“We subscribe to disparate feeds from many market data vendors,” said Rich Weston, Director and Global Head of Market Data at BMO. “Our data management team wanted to enhance our abilities to see how and where our market data was being consumed. We also wanted an architecture that could help us address the challenges and opportunities ahead, delivering improved time-to-market for new initiatives while effectively managing costs. BMO Skyway gives us that.”

Built on Xignite Enterprise, BMO Skyway centralizes and caches market and reference data collected from vendors in the cloud and provides employees and downstream systems with easy access to that data. Xignite Enterprise supports both native FTP format emulators for seamless and rapid migration, and next-generation REST-based APIs to fuel innovation. BMO now has greater storage capabilities, as well as access to user metrics and authentication functionality that ensures licensing compliance and helps optimize total cost of ownership (TCO) across multiple data vendors.

“Xignite created a centralized access point, which allows us to expose our catalogue of market pricing and reference data without significant re-engineering costs,” said Weston. “Our users can pull data into portals, proprietary in-house systems and applications in a matter of minutes because the data is easy to find and access. Our cost transparency has improved significantly and as a result, we can now model how our data is being used and reallocate the total cost to deliver and maintain the market data we provide as a service.”

“Easy and timely access to market data is going to be critical to the financial services industry’s ability to re-invent itself in the post-credit-crisis era,” said Stephane Dubois, Xignite CEO and founder. “Innovative organizations are realizing that they cannot entertain the status quo. They must take advantage of new technologies, such as the public cloud and APIs, to knock billions of dollars off their cost infrastructure while gaining the speed they need to compete in the new world.”

“BMO Skyway now gives us the capability to increase the value of our market and reference data resources,” said Weston. “But it is even more significant that we are now armed to innovate at the speed of a Silicon Valley startup.”

The American Financial Technology Awards, hosted by Waters magazine and WatersTechnology.com, recognize excellence in the deployment and management of financial technology within the asset management and investment banking communities. The “Best Cloud Initiative” award recognizes buy-side and sell-side firms, as well as exchanges, that demonstrate the greatest return on investment by deploying an internal cloud or integrating one or more third-party cloud environments.

About Xignite

Xignite, Inc. is the leading provider of market data cloud solutions. Xignite makes sourcing and integrating real-time and reference market data into apps and devices easy and more cost-effective than alternative data feeds. The Silicon Valley-based company fuels FinTech innovation by powering web sites and apps for more than 1000 financial services, media, software and corporate clients, including FinTech standouts Betterment, Future Advisor, Personal Capital, SigFig, Stocktwits, Wealthfront, and Yodlee. The company’s Xignite Enterprise solution also powers private data distribution solutions for financial institutions, exchanges, and market data vendors including BMO, NASDAQ OMX, NYSE Technologies, and SIX Financial Information. For more information, visit http://www.xignite.com or follow on Twitter @xignite.

About BMO Financial Group

Established in 1817 as Bank of Montreal, BMO Financial Group is a highly diversified financial services organization based in North America. The bank offers a broad range of retail banking, wealth management and investment banking products and services to more than 12 million customers. BMO Financial Group had total assets of $589 billion and more than 46,000 employees at October 31, 2014.