Firms’ valuation processes are becoming increasingly stretched and in some cases are “materially flawed or inadequate”, according to the UK Financial Services Authority (FSA). In an open letter to the CEOs of banks and investment firms, FSA chief executive Hector Sants has criticised the lack of due care and attention being given to the area of valuation within these firms.

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Earlier this week, Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) chairman Christopher Cox announced the upgrade to its reporting and disclosure system, the Edgar database. According to Cox, the new XBRL-based platform will give investors faster and easier access to key financial information about public companies and mutual funds, when it is introduced over the next three years.

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The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has unveiled a new one-stop online reference site to assist mutual funds in their anti-money laundering (AML) compliance efforts. It has also launched a new centralised phone line specifically for securities firms to report the filing of a suspicious activity report (SAR) that may require immediate attention by the SEC.

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Following months of discussions, the US Federal Reserve and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) have finally signed a formal agreement that explicitly allows for the two agencies to share information about the inner workings of investment banks.

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The US Federal Reserve and Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) are discussing an agreement to revamp the regulation of the US financial markets, which could include drawing up data sharing agreements between the two bodies.

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Christopher Cox, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) chairman, is expected to release recommendations this week about how US companies can adopt extensible business reporting language (XBRL) for their financial reporting. This follows the SEC Advisory Committee on Improvements to Financial Reporting’s report, released in February, which recommended that companies should use XBRL to tag their financial data.

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Data, portfolio valuations and OTC derivatives trade processing vendor Markit has launched a new documentation library that allows financial institutions to post, manage and share compliance, counterparty credit and regulatory documents securely.

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Download this special report for FREE now! Click the link below.

Meeting risk and compliance requirements has always been a driver for investment in improved management of reference data, but the importance of risk and compliance has never been higher than in the current environment. The reference data challenges created by MiFID were many and complex, and dealing with them is an ongoing challenge for financial institutions. Meanwhile the regulatory burden is only growing. And can efficient management of risk – by instrument type and by counterparty – ever have been more important than it is post sub-prime?

In this special report we have brought together contributions from a number of key providers, enabling them to explain to you how they can support you in your efforts to create world class compliance and risk management capabilities.

Participants include:

  Reference Data Review - Special Report - Feb. 2008 (665.4 KiB)
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Data managers are grappling with some “deep and complex” issues related to vital functions such as trade reporting since the introduction of MiFID in Europe, London-based practitioners say.

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Cicada has revealed the next version upgrade of its Cicada Profiler software, a packaged solution for anti-money laundering and Know Your Customer (KYC) data management requirements. The software is designed to bring improved collaboration, control and centralisation to customer identification and risk-based due diligence processes. The release focuses on increased integration with third-party data used in the KYC review process. Users will be able to process alerts, updates and other news from third-party sources in conjunction with the client data records maintained in Cicada Profiler.

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).

Fortent, a provider of information and technology to the risk and compliance market, has launched Fortent Inform, a tool designed to help financial institutions streamline their management of regulatory information. As a web-based, centralized source of compliance information and analysis, Fortent Inform provides a single source for US federal and state financial regulations and related documents such as guidance, speeches and reports.

Cicada has created a new subsidiary, Profiler Solutions, to focus on compliance. Headed by Cicada executive vice president Hubert Holmes, the new business unit will offer software solutions to help firms meet regulatory requirements around know your customer (KYC) and anti-money laundering (AML), based on its Profiler solution. As reported in Reference Data Review last month, Cicada is also releasing Profiler modules targeting the customer data issues raised by MiFID.

Cicada has upgraded Cicada Profiler software, adding improved capabilities to meet firms’ anti-money laundering and know your customer compliance needs. Release 1.1 of Cicada Profiler introduces an ownership checklist that can trigger collection of corporate ownership data, for example, based on customer type. The new version supports different types of ownership definitions and supports one-to-many relationships, allowing users to create complex hierarchies within their customer databases.

A new U.K. Market Implementation Group (UKMIG) is aiming to harmonise U.K. national rules and practices relating to corporate actions processing, including distributions, shareholder rights and company reorganisations. The group, jointly chaired by the British Bankers’ Association (BBA) and CrestCo, is aiming to implement measures to remove Barrier 3, as set by the 2003 report from the Giovannini Group. The U.K.’s Department of Trade and Industry, Financial Services Authority (FSA) and the Bank of England have each been invited to nominate a representative in an observer capacity.

The MiFID Joint Working Group last month issued a discussion paper to look at the impact of the EU’s upcoming Markets in Financial Instruments Directive on reference data. The paper – The Implications for Reference Data under the Markets in Financial Instrument Directive – suggests that MiFID may have significant impact on several areas of reference data, including the identification of instruments, of investment firms (and all counterparties), and of trading venues.

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Recent press reports suggest that MiFID’s implementation deadline will be pushed back to November 2007. EU member allegedly met on October 21 to discuss pushing back the deadline. READ THE REST

JPMorgan Worldwide Securities Services has introduced two new websites targeted at chief compliance officers to help them meet various mutual fund compliance requirements.
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission requires mutual funds to appoint COOs and implement comprehensive policies and procedures to prevent fund companies and advisors from violating SEC regulations and securities laws. The new websites – a public and client site – provide information about compliance and a variety of resources for COOs. The public site is available at www.jpmorgan.com/wss. For clients, the site includes news and communications, information on policies and procedures, SAS 70 reports on fund accounting and custody, and links to the full text of the SEC Rules 38a-1 and 206(4)-7.

Cicada is packaging its data management software and data cleansing team to offer a purpose-built Know Your Customer (KYC) solution. The framework will provide configurable, rules-based workflow schema to help financial institutions manage their client data review process, as well as keep an audit trail and source attribution details. The solution can manage both internal data and external vendor feeds, including legal entity data from the company’s new subsidiary.

The MiFID – Markets in Financial Instruments Directive – Joint Working Group efforts (Reference Data Review, April 2005) were kicked off earlier this month with the first meeting being held in London, and tasks being assigned to participants. The forward-looking objectives of the group, according to the group’s chairman Chris Pickles, are four-fold. They are, focusing on best practice recommendations for best execution (spearheaded by ISITC-Europe), real-time market data (SIIA/FISD), reference data standards around business entity identifiers and unique instrument identifiers (RDUG), and defining a standard protocol for communicating information (Fix Protocol). The next full working group meeting is set for mid-June.