FIMA’s afternoon panel on data standardisation saw fireworks fly between the EDM Council’s managing director Mike Atkin and JWG’s PJ Di Giammarino. The two disagreed on the best way to proceed with the standardisation charge in the data space, with Atkin sitting on the side of the fence for getting into data fundamentals and setting down standards at the outset, and Di Giammarino on the other side, campaigning for data managers to first get buy in from their business leaders.

Atkin, who has proved a key proponent of the European Central Bank’s (ECB) reference data utility proposals, elaborated on his vision for a regulatory driven overhaul of the world of data standards. “Standards have got a bad rep in the industry but they are important for the market to be able to deal with systemic risk and iron out all of the problems underlying the financial crisis,” he argued.

Di Giammarino, on the other hand, suggested that the data community should “back up” and come up with a “proper business case” before progressing down the road to standardisation. The ECB’s external statistics division head Francis Gross agreed that business cases were important in the endeavour to get industry traction. Gross said it would be interesting to do a P&L analysis on bad data in order to track how the industry has been financially impacted overall as part of this endeavour, this would then justify investment of a “few million” in a utility to sort out the problem.

Di Giammarino cautioned that the industry should be wary of “building standards upon a Tower of Babel”, where business drivers are not at the foundation of these standards. He concluded that the issues should be discussed with “people outside of this room”, namely those at the top of financial institutions rather than data managers, in order to get buy in to the data standardisation process.

Atkin responded that he believed the business case was already well understood by the industry with regards to bad data. He also suggested that it was now appreciated that ISO may be a great governance body for standards but it is not a body suitable for standards development. He indicated that another body might be more appropriate to take on this function (the EDM Council, perhaps?). He used the example of corporate actions data standards as a model to follow in the standardisation process and indicated that issuers should be compelled by regulation to tag data at source.

Neither party seemed convinced by the other’s argument and the conclusion was to agree to disagree.