Reference data is used to identify different securities when making a trade.On Wall Street, making a change to a core system is not unlike undergoing heart or brain surgery.
Reference data is information associated with certain aspects of a given trade, such as what's being traded , who the trade is between , the value or price of a trade, and so on. Having a system that can scale with the growth of the market and support the complexity of multiple trading strategies can have cascading effects to the overall efficiency of the firm. But the existing solution, an unwieldy combination of legacy systems, was limiting Citadel's rapid growth and it needed an upgrade.
"There isn't a team or system in the organization that does not touch this platform," Rituraj Deb Nath, head of enterprise data engineering, a group that oversees reference data and pricing requirements of the hedge fund and Citadel Securities, told Insider.