A-Team group takes the temperature of the reference data community at FIMA in London earlier this month. Find out what guests at the Avox drinks reception had to say about the current market conditions and their hopes for 2009.

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FIMA 2008, surprisingly for a financial services conference, focussed on the negative aspects of capitalism – stressing that a range of deadly sins including greed and sloth had got the world in to the mess it is in today. However, as our podcast points out, that doesn’t necessarily mean the future is bleak for reference data.

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The current market climate has meant that institutions are under serious pressure to cut costs and improve operational efficiency and this may mean they decide to go the outsourcing route, said Liam Davis, vice president of global data management at Northern Trust. “We need to do more with less and provide a higher level of service to our clients and offshoring is a way to reduce costs and allow institutions to focus on meeting these needs,” he explained to the FIMA 2008 delegation.

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Institutions should keep a small team of data experts on board in order to adequately monitor that service level agreements are being met by outsourcing providers and data requirements are being catered to by offshore teams, agreed FIMA 2008’s panel on offshoring and outsourcing.

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Given the rise of high profile incidents related to rogue trading, a major US bank has worked with business and technology consultant Detica to pull together its data to monitor operational risk across a number of controls in order to provide an effective tool to combating these incidents. Through the process, however, other business benefits emerged, said Roger Braybrooks, head of research for global financial markets at Detica.

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Not all data should be centralised and there has to be a rationale for the data that you do centralise, said Peter Serenita, chief data officer of JPMorgan Worldwide Securities Services in a FIMA panel about ‘Ensuring a successful group-wide data management model’.

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The European Central Bank’s Centralised Securities Database (CSDB) could be used as the industry’s recognised source of business entity identifiers in the future, contended Soeren Kier Christensen, managing director of Finsoft Financial Systems. “Each institution needs a unique identifier and the CSDB currently tracks these for each European institution. By using these already standardised codes, the financial market could cut out a lot of the costs related to entity data management,” he said.

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Rather than going through a complex chain of interpretation by data vendors and internal processes, prospectus data should be made available in an electronic format directly to the market, suggested Francis Gross, head of the external statistics division at the European Central Bank (ECB). “This would require drastic changes to the current prospectus process and the production of electronic data sheets in a standardised format, but it would reap many benefits in terms of costs to issuers and the industry as a whole,” he explained.

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