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.
In order to ensure that the industry isn’t faced with just another unique identifier to map to, data managers need to take action and provide feedback on their requirements to the regulatory community, according to Mark Davies, head of reference data at Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS). Davies, who is an active member of think tank JWG’s Customer Data Management Group (CDMG), reckons helping regulators to come up with reference data standards for entity and instrument identification is key to guaranteeing some progress is made.

















In addition to its entity data management project (see our coverage
In a move that mirrors some of the actions being taken across the pond with regards to customer data infractions, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has charged US-based broker-dealer Pinnacle Capital Markets with failing to comply with a key piece of anti-money laundering (AML) legislation and forced it to pay out a US$25,000 fine. The regulator indicates that the firm failed to correctly verify the identities of its customers and document this information for a period of six years, despite having established a specific customer identification programme for this purpose. Moreover, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) has fined Pinnacle another US$25,000 for violating the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) due to its related customer data management failings.
The EDM Council has been working in partnership with IT consultancy firm Headstrong to put together a global data management benchmarking survey, aimed at providing comparable metrics on the data management projects going on across the industry. The survey involved 65 firms and will be discussed at an upcoming launch event in New York in a couple of weeks’ time. In the meantime, the data management industry group has more than enough to be getting along with, given that the core of its semantics repository is nearing completion.
The issuer community is likely to remain a sticking point for the Swift, XBRL US and Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) initiative to introduce XBRL data tagging to issuer documents for the foreseeable future, according to Kees Middendorp, senior consultant for corporate actions at solution vendor SmartStream Technologies. Although the introduction of XBRL to the corporate actions sector is a positive development for the industry overall in theory, it could also involve an expensive and lengthy implementation process, he explains to A-Team Insight.
The Information Providers User Group’s (IPUG) last annual general meeting saw the confirmation of the main deliverables for the group over the next year, including the highlighting of a number of vendor solutions to come under the group’s scrutiny. One of IPUG’s key activities of late has been the lobbying of the vendor community (see activities to this end earlier this year
A-Team Insight catches up with Gerard Bermingham, vice president of business strategy for the Americas at vendor Information Mosaic, about his views on Swift’s new 2015 strategy and how the industry network operator should figure in the standards development process and the reference data industry of the future.



