The recently published examiner report into the Lehman bankruptcy indicates the scale of the data challenge faced when winding down a financial institution of its size: the examiner was faced with three perabytes (otherwise known as 350 billion pages) of electronically stored data to process. Unsurprisingly, given the fact that information needed to be presented before the end of the next century, the examiner was only able to collect and process five million of these documents (around 40,000,000 pages, or 0.01% of the total number of pages). This challenge was further exacerbated by the storage of this data on “arcane, outdated or non-standard" systems, said the report by Anton Valukas of Jenner & Block.
The Colombian central securities depository (CSD) Deposito Centralizado de Valores de Colombia (Deceval) has been appointed as the national numbering agency for the country, according to a recent letter from the CSD’s CEO Jorge Hernan Jaramillo Ossa. Deceval will therefore be responsible for allocating six character Classification of Financial Instrument (CFI) codes and 12 character International Securities Identification Number (ISIN) codes for securities in the Colombian market that are subject to the ISO 6166 and ISO 10962 standards.
They may differ in their opinions in how to go about effecting change (see last year’s FIMA standards panel for proof, see 
Since its decision to sign up for the MoneyMate investment data management solution in October last year, Schroders has been working closely with the vendor to control the aggregation and cleansing of their product information for presentation on websites. Gerard Walsh, head of change management for the web and customer relationship management (CRM) at Schroders, and Ronan Brennan, chief technology officer at MoneyMate, explain that the solution is aimed at enhancing the timeliness, accuracy and consistency of Schroders’ product information, which is communicated to their clients and distribution channels.
The International Swaps and Derivatives Association (ISDA) has this week pledged its support for the establishment of global central repositories for OTC derivatives data and its commitment to the provision of relevant transaction data to supervisory authorities. The promises were made in a letter that has been sent to the heads of the primary supervisory authorities of each of the regulated signatories, which include buy side firms such as BlueMountain Capital and Goldman Sachs Asset Management and sell side firms such as JPMorgan and Citi.
Judging by the number of references that have been made to living wills legislation during reference data related events and conferences recently, the market is already well aware of the data challenge awaiting it. However, for those that may have been asleep for the last few months, Thomas Huertas, director of the banking sector for the UK Financial Services Authority (FSA) and vice chairman of the Committee of European Banking Supervisors (CEBS), has been doing his level best to raise awareness of these challenges and how the industry can tackle them.
A-Team Insight Exchange is a new event series for 2010, which will combine A-Team’s expertise in financial markets IT with thought leadership from world-class technology innovators and practical experience from financial market practitioners.
After a difficult first quarter of fiscal 2010 (see our coverage here), data and analytics vendor FactSet Research Systems seems to be experiencing a return to form with an overall revenue increase of 0.5% for the second quarter on previous year’s figures. Phil Hadley, chairman and CEO of the vendor, indicates that he believes the investment in its business via the launch of a new platform and the decision to go from offering data integration services to offering its own data feeds has paid off for FactSet and is the reason behind its “highest quarterly user growth in two years”.
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