AMA: I'm Rob Borthwick, Head of Product - Datafeeds at Iress, Ask Me Anything!

Hi Rob, 

We have regularly been finding ourselves having problems with our data feeds. We often see asset units out, cash account balances incorrect and data feeds just are not refreshing for weeks. To fix these, we are needing to remap portfolios, delete additional transactions (that did not occur at all on the platform), or finding other work arounds to continue with our workflow.

Is there a solution to ensure that data feeds are a reliable source of information? Recently we have had consistent issues with Expand and Netwealth data feeds.

Annabelle 

Hi Rob,

With regard to datafeeds that require an EPI log in and password that expire every 12 months, do you have any suggestions in XPLAN that can automatically send out the adviser a reminder that their code is about to expire? 

The only options I can think of is either diary or tasks, but both these are additional steps for the advisers to add or create the task/event. 

Ideally, we would like to use scheduler as this would be the most efficient way as we would only need to set it up once for all advisers, however I cannot find an option to search for adviser mappings that are expiring. 

Thanks
Jackie

Hi Rob,

My query relates to Client Focus data feeds for insurance and super funds (who provide Client Focus data).

When you manually enter data into Xplan for a plan/cover that has been imported through a datafeed, the feed generally overrides the manual entries. Providers often don’t supply all the necessary data, requiring advisers to manually input missing information.

While datafeeds improve efficiency, the issue of manual data being overridden leads many advisers to avoid using them for the Client Focus feeds.

Do you have any suggestions to prevent this so that advisers can utilise datafeeds without losing manually entered data?

I am aware IPS datafeeds have a date lock functionality, is there such an option I may have overlooked that is available for the Client Focus datafeeds at a client level? 

Thanks

Jackie

Hi rob.borthwick thank you for creating this discussion, data feeds have been a source of pain for us for a long time, we often get told it is the product provider ie platform that is the issues, they will say it is iress can you explain why data feeds are such an issue maybe understanding may assist.  We do need to fix our data quite a lot

Asini we have this discussion specifically on data feeds, if you have any additional thoughts or questions? 

We have raised issue with IRESS about the Datafeeds not working also have asked the insurers if they have been sending the data feeds. The conclussion we came to is that Insurers have been sending the datafeeds and IRESS has been doing the datafeeds but somehow we cannot see the data at our end.

When we raise the ticket with IRESS we are told to check with the Insurer and the insurer sends us to IRESS, but there is no resolution till date.

Can you please advise what could be the issue here?

We have 3 questions:

1. We are finding that that cover information coming through on the datafeeds seems to be duplicating or containing incorrect amounts (such as 2 lines on the same cover for 2 different amounts, which don't add up to the correct total cover amount the client has).  This means the client total cover amount and the individual cover line amounts are incorrect.  When you check the insurer portal the information is correct so how is it coming through incorrectly on the datafeed?
2. Some insurers contain information that can't be mapped - clients are coming through as both clients and companies (e.g. Mr C & Mrs J Weber come through as a company (this is the addresses field on a letter not an actual entity, but also as Carl Weber, and Jess Weber come through as individuals) thus causing hundreds of Do Not Map or duplicates for the company record.  Is there a way to stop these Company entities company coming in?  If we turn on this datafeed we are going to have thousands of entity records to go through and mark as Do Not Map.
3. We have only 4 insurers with datafeeds and 6 who don't have datafeeds, is there a timeline to have the other insurers provide datafeeds?

Hi Rob,

We are new to datafeeds and we are trying to get everything set up so we can start using the reports and rely on the data. There are a few questions that we have:

1. We currently have over 15,000 items in our reconciliation summary report. Many of these items are false negatives and can be set to "Do not report". Is there an easy way to do this in bulk? 
2. There are some securities that are unlisted and the pricing is not coming through in the datafeed. We need to manually update the unit pricing in XPLAN. How can this be done?
3. Similarly, there are some unlisted securities that we need to add to XPLAN and update pricing. Are there instructions on how this can be done? We've tried searching the online help, and can't find any material. 

Thanks for your help.

TIna

Hi Rob, can you explain the difficulty in getting accurate data feed for insurance providers that include the features of the covers etc? Our licensee recommends we switch data feeds off for insurance as there are issues with this. Obviously this isn’t ideal and I would love to use the feeds, particular when merging the data into documents. Cheers, Luke

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