Bombarded by a barrage of incoming regulations, data managers in Europe are looking for the ‘golden copy’ of regulatory requirements: the regulation compliance with which will give them most bang for the buck in meeting the demands of the rest of the regulations they are faced with. Solvency II may come close as this ‘golden regulation’.
Ostensibly aimed at embedding risk management into the insurance industry, the regulation has serious repercussions for asset managers and the third-party administrators that service them. Solvency II, which starts to take effect at the beginning of 2013, places a significant reporting burden on asset managers, which will be required to provide unprecedented levels of transparency on the investments of their insurance company clients.
The idea of an LEI pre-dates the 2008 financial crisis by several decades. The ISO (International Organization for Standardization) had advocated an LEI (at one time called the IBEI – International Business Entity Identifier) for many years, but was unable to pinpoint an organization ready to build and maintain such a directory. For many securities industry participants, existing identifiers, such as the Bank Identifier Code (BIC), met most of the market’s needs.
Big Data has emerged in recent months as a potential technology solution to the issue of dealing with vast amounts of data within the enterprise. As in other industries, financial services firms of all kinds are drowning in data, both in terms of the sheer volume of information they generate and / or have to deal with, and in terms of the growing and diverse types of data they confront in those efforts.
Industry leading financial institutions are reaping operational benefits and avoiding significant unnecessary financial exposures by ensuring the quality and the timeliness of their corporate actions data. As well as minimising costs from operational disruption caused by incorrect or incomplete data, these firms are able to reduce the risk of litigation and compensation claims arising from corporate actions errors, allowing them to save on the capital they set aside to mitigate these risks and avoid reputational harm. In many cases, the amounts involved are measured in the millions, of pounds, euros or dollars.
In this paper, we take a look at why transparency in the valuation process is important, which regulations demand that attention is given to your transparency policies, how firms should adapt their evaluations data strategy to meet client and regulatory requirements. We also provide a check list of 10 key things financial institutions need to think about in order to satisfy the transparency needs of their clients, auditors and regulators. 
