Auckland start-up IDIOM has struck a deal which will allow United States company Cicada to build the IDIOM Decision Suite rules engine into its Composer plus+ financial data systems.

Cicada takes data such as stock market feeds, legal and regulatory information and credit data, checks it for accuracy, cleans up the formats and sends it back for use in applications.

Customers include the Deutsche Borse German stock exchange and the Nasdaq Unlisted Trading Privileges service, as well as companies which use such data for risk or credit management, trading, portfolio management, ticker plants and other applications.

It sells its technology as a package for in-house use or as an outsourced managed service, which includes manual intervention and exception handling.

Cicada chief executive Gregory Smith said the IDIOM rules engine will greatly increase the productivity and efficiency of the data analysts using Composer plus+.

IDIOM chief executive Mark Norton said in the three months since its launch, Decision Suite had generated considerable interest among vendors supplying technology to the insurance and financial services sectors, where Cicada is a world leader.

Although its technology can be sold as a standalone product, IDIOM's preference is to make OEM (Original Equipment Manufacture) deals so it comes packaged with other vendor's software. Several more such deals are in the pipeline.

Norton, who founded the company after a 25-year IT career within the insurance industry, said IDIOM's business model, which allows OEM partners to embed its code within their own code, has advantages over competing rules engines which require separate servers and customer licences.