The IBM Data Governance Council, which was set up three years ago by IBM and comprises 50 financial market firms, is currently discussing establishing best practices for the industry on how to manage critical financial data. The council plans to build what it calls an “information governance framework”, which will be based on their existing data governance maturity model.

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The IBM Data Governance Council, which was set up three years ago by IBM and comprises 50 financial market firms, is currently discussing establishing best practices for the industry on how to manage critical financial data.

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DClear, the wholly owned subsidiary of the investment arm of the Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC), has released plans for a reference data utility for the global financial market. The aim of the project is to provide a shared copy of reference data among financial market participants on both the buy and sell sides. It is hoped that DClear will be the first comprehensive clean data service providing all the reference data a company will need to trade and perform post-trade processing across a large range of financial instruments.

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Regardless of an understanding of the benefits of introducing a standard business entity identifier (BEI), the industry is as yet unconvinced that the cost of its introduction is justifiable. That is the message that the EDM Council, consultancy firm Bearingpoint and Swift heard loud and clear during interviews conducted with 15 international financial institutions as part of their research project on the future of the BEI.

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Broadening the adoption of a standard identifier for business entities, Telekurs Financial has implemented the International Business Entity Identifier (IBEI) codes for its Valordata Feed (VDF) and its financial display Telekurs iD. The vendor has been working on this implementation since June 2007 in order to allow European customers to identify participants in the processing chain of cross-border securities trading via IBEI codes.

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The Financial Information Services Division (FISD) of the Software and Information Industry Association has released a new MDDL 3.0 Open Source licence for the financial information industry.

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The Financial Information Services Division of the Software and Information Industry Association (FISD) has released a new MDDL 3.0 Open Source licence for the financial information industry. MDDL, or Market Data Definition Language, is an open industry standard XML dialect for securities market data. The announcement of the new licence aims to remove possible ambiguity regarding intellectual property issues associated with using MDDL. “This confirms that MDDL is an open standard and, since it is a ‘non-GPL’ licence, it is not subject to ‘downstream’ licensing concerns,” according to Bill Nichols, programme director for securities processing automation at FISD.

Unrest among industry participants about the efficacy of ISO standards creation is reaching a peak as the failure of the formal process to keep pace with the reality of market requirements looks set to prompt a rethink about the best way to create standards for financial markets.

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Swift is gearing Swift is gearing up for the live launch of its ISO 20022-based proxy voting messages on the network. This follows a pilot of the new messages, which replace earlier ISO 15022-based messages and market practice for proxy voting (Reference Data Review, November 2006). Based on feedback from the pilot, Swift’s standards group has refined the messages, ensuring the live versions are “thoroughly proven”, according to Linda Bookheim, senior manager at Swift.

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Swift has opened the SWIFTDirectories Data Update service, a secure and confidential website where financial institutions can maintain their SEPA-related data. Access to this website is open to any appointed employee of a financial institution. Users can register online and update payments-related data belonging to their financial institution whenever required. From the end of December 2007, Swift will offer two new directories, the BICPlusIBAN Directory and the SEPA Routing Directory, to provide the reference data that financial institutions need to achieve STP.
 Registered users of the SWIFTDirectories Data Update service can update their institution’s compliance to the SEPA credit transfer and (at a later stage) direct debit schemes, their operational readiness, their participation in ACHs and CSMs, and IBAN related data such as national bank identifiers applied in IBANs (at a later stage) and the BICs that the institution issues with the IBANs. This service is free of charge. The updated data will be included in the published Swift directories.

The operations group of German bank West LB AG has begun the roll-out of Asset Control’s AC Plus data management solution to first replace a legacy mainframe system managing feeds from WM and Bloomberg, with a view to using AC Plus to replace an inhouse built centralised data management solution in the longer term. The bank is in UAT now for the first deliverable, set to go live in October.

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Awareness of the fact that missing or inaccurate standing settlement instructions (SSIs) are a major inhibitor to true straight-through processing (STP) is as long-standing as the industry’s focus on STP itself. Problems with SSIs are still the biggest single cause of reference data-related trade fails, which themselves are the second biggest cause of fails behind short stock. Periodically the SSI problem rises to the surface of the industry’s consciousness and an initiative is born to try to address it, but as things stand today the challenge of maintaining accurate SSI data – which is anything but “static” – remains as acute as it has ever been.

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Barclays Global Investors and Brown Brothers Harriman have become the first asset manager and custodian to exchange FpML (Financial products Markup Language) based contract notifications over SwiftNet. Soon after, State Street, on behalf of PIMCO and other buy-side customers, began testing FpML communication with Bank of New York, Mellon Bank, Northern Trust and State Street Corp. Swift launched the SwiftNet FpML programme, in cooperation with ISDA (the International Swaps and Derivatives Association), earlier this year in a bid to automate OTC derivatives post-trade processing.

Securities reference data is a key area where there are gaps in existing ISO message coverage which will need to be filled if ISO messaging is to provide a complete solution for removing Giovannini Barrier 1, a gap analysis exercise recently completed by Swift has concluded. Barrier 1 refers to the inefficiencies created by the use of multiple protocols for messaging in Europe’s clearing and settlement processes. Swift has been charged with spearheading efforts to eliminate this barrier, and has concluded based on consultation with the industry that ISO messages represent the best option on which to standardise. In late June Swift published its final report on the high-level gaps in ISO messaging, following a year long consultative exercise. It remains on track to deliver the standards to eliminate key high-level gaps by the March 2011 deadline set in the Giovannini Protocol (which seeks to improve Europe’s clearing and settlement efficiency overall), it says.

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Swift has received unanimous approval at its AGM for the addition of Financial Market Regulators as a new participant category on the network. Admitting regulators to Swift will make it easier for Swift members and users to meet regulatory transaction reporting obligations, while facilitating the development of global regulatory reporting solutions, Swift says. The approval is a vital underpinning for Swift’s proposed transaction reporting solution, initially targeted for use under MiFID, with a view to being extended to other jurisdictions over time (Reference Data Review, April 2007).

Version 3.0 of MDDL (Market Data Definition Language) is now available, but the jury’s out on whether the latest iteration of the XML dialect for securities market data will be greeted with any greater degree of enthusiasm by the market than its predecessors. GoldenSource – historically a strong advocate of the standard – has not renewed its membership of MDDL developer FISD, saying pull on resources prevents it from giving the necessary level of commitment. And FISD recently released a new positioning statement on its role in standards development, which could speak volumes.

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Swift is close to completing an ISO 20022 formatted transaction reporting message which it plans to pilot for three months on its network prior to launching a commercially available solution by the end of October in readiness for the November 1 Markets in Financial Services Directive (MiFID) implementation deadline.

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MEGACOR, Vermeg’s end-to-end corporate actions solution, has completed the SwiftNet Testing and Certification Service Proof of Concept (POC) project for ISO 15022 corporate actions messages. MEGACOR has also been accredited, for the fifth consecutive year, with the SwiftReady Gold Label in the corporate actions category.

The Committee of European Securities Regulators (CESR) has published the responses to its public consultation on the use of reference data standard codes in transaction reporting under MiFID. By press time however CESR had not published its final decisions on the codes to be used, so it is as yet unclear whether the responses will prompt it to make any changes to the suggested line-up of codes in its December 2006 publication on the subject. 

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Telekurs Financial has released further details of the reference data it is adding to its Valordata Feed (VDF) to help its clients comply with MiFID. These details add flesh to the bones of the announcement the vendor made late last year of its plans to address the data requirements of MiFID (Reference Data Review, November 2006).

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