Given the current financial crisis it was unsurprising that this year’s FIMA conference – held in London on 11 to 13 November – was focused on surviving the current financial crisis by employing better data management strategies. Although numbers were down and a number of familiar faces, such as Citi’s John Bottega, were absent, the mood remained cautiously optimistic. Data management, it seems, has been thrust into the spotlight as the result of increased regulatory scrutiny and the spectre of reputational risk.

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Unusually for a financial services conference, this year’s FIMA focused on the negative aspects of capitalism; the topic of the seven deadly sins kept cropping up throughout the sessions – including greed, sloth and gluttony (well, at the buffet table at the very least…).

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Despite the downturn in the markets, corporate actions automation has not fallen off the industry radar, according to speakers at CityIQ and Swift’s London seminar at the end of October. Rather than driving down spending, a reduced tolerance for risk provoked by recent events could instead encourage increased investment in corporate actions automation in the coming months, attendees to the event were told.

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With the explosive growth in corporate events – primarily due to the current restructuring of debt or refinancing – those financial institutions that have invested in technology and integrated data sets will be the best placed to cope with the increase in volumes, according to David Kane, senior vice president of securities and operations at JP Morgan Worldwide Securities Services.

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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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Radical thinking on industry business models is needed in such disastrous times, proselytised Avox’s Ken Price at FIMA this morning. He suggests turning the traditional ‘user in the middle sources multiple vendors’ model on its head so that the users, who after all generate most of the data themselves, become the centre of the model and work alongside vendors and other bodies such as tax authorities, registration authorities, and regulators and more. “There’s a huge amount of power in collaboration,” he said.

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In spite of – or, indeed, maybe because of – the grim news emanating from the financial pages in recent weeks, enterprise data management practitioners have much to be optimistic about. That was at least the impression given by presenters in the Data Integration stream of the FIMA Financial Data Management Conference Wednesday afternoon.

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With the explosive growth in corporate events – primarily due to the current restructuring of debt or refinancing – those financial institutions that have invested in technology and integrated data sets will be the best placed to cope with the increase in volumes, according to David Kane, senior vice president of securities and operations at JP Morgan Worldwide Securities Services.

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Although standards for legal entity data are likely to evolve over time and become more rigorous, there does not exist today a standard directory of identifiers for legal entities across global jurisdictions, said James Redfern, head of sales and marketing at CounterpartyLink. But with an average of 27% of company records held at financial institutions deemed inaccurate, firms need to figure out how to fix these problems and then continue to maintain the database in the absence of any industry standard, particularly in current conditions, he suggested.

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Radical thinking on industry business models is needed in such disastrous times, proselytised Avox’s Ken Price at FIMA this morning. He suggests turning the traditional ‘user in the middle sources multiple vendors’ model on its head so that the users, who after all generate most of the data themselves, become the centre of the model and work alongside vendors and other bodies such as tax authorities, registration authorities, and regulators and more. “There’s a huge amount of power in collaboration,” he said.

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There are going to be a slew of upcoming regulations post credit-crunch and industry collaboration will be essential to address data management processes needed to comply, according to a panel of industry practitioners at FIMA. But progress to date has been slow, and industry bodies and participants are not talking to each other enough to progress the issues.

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Service level agreements were a key topic in this morning’s roundtable discussions at FIMA 2008, with one data manager at a Tier 1 financial institution suggesting that many SLA’s are now likely to be revisited in order to achieve better responses from their data suppliers after the current market conditions highlighted the need for faster answers to questions from the vendors.

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If you’re going to take a federated approach to data management in order to solve issues, such as regulatory compliance, Peter Giordano of Oppenheimer & Co. advised delegates at FIMA 2008 that you make your business case tangible by including such things as “neat analytics” or dashboards for the front office, in order to help management understand the tangible results that can be gained, and thus secure funding.

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Keith Hale, executive vice president and co-founder of Netik, opened the second day of FIMA 2008 by quoting Warren Buffet in a data management context: “Financial markets are either driven by greed or fear, according to Warren Buffet, and it seems that recent times have flipped the driver from greed to fear. This fear is good for data management projects as they are more likely to get funding due to regulatory pressure,” Hale told delegates.

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Institutions need to invest in automated processes and good quality staff in order to adequately assess their risk exposure within data management process, said BNY Mellon’s Matthew Cox, head of securities data management, EMEA. They also need to understand the internal risks that are posed by bad quality data and examine what vendors can and can’t provide in terms of data accuracy, he explained to the FIMA 2008 delegation.

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Institutions should follow the model of courier firms such as UPS when designing their data management frameworks, Dr Vinay Pampapathi, executive director of the technology division at Daiwa Securities SMBC Europe, told the delegates in attendance at this morning’s opening session to FIMA 2008.

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Financial institutions need to be proactive in the management of their vendor relationships, said Peter Largier, global head of reference data analysis and projects at Credit Suisse. “You need to professionally evaluate the service you are getting from your data vendors,” he told delegates to FIMA 2008.

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By Bob Cumberbatch, business lines director, Interactive Data (Europe)

Now is a critical time for organisations to prioritise reference data management. Managing reference data has not always been viewed as a major corporate priority. Often seen as data processing and record keeping, it has not been an essential component of a risk management strategy for a multinational financial institution. But with the volatility of the global financial markets and subprime issues, risk management is today’s focus and high quality reference data plays a vital role in supporting this.

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What do the FIMA events represent to the data management community – why do people choose to attend?
They represent the opportunity for data management professionals to share information and find common ground about industry trends in an area of the business that is of mutual benefit and where we can find win-win solutions by joining up.

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