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The knowledge platform for the financial technology industry

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Talking Reference Data with Andrew Delaney: The Birth of a New Standard

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The UK National Childbirth Trust – the NCT – is a venerable organisation that helps first time parents prepare for the arrival of their little bundle of joy. For mothers, it helps reduce the obvious stress of anticipation of the big day and creates a network of like-minded mums who swap tips and tales of their travails post-event.

For fathers the NCT provides a sometimes bewildering array of technical terms – caps, collars and floors that have nothing to do with derivatives – and largely offers the ‘tools’ to help the dads help the mums come D-Day. After all, the mums are the ones who do all the work.

What the NCT isn’t so hot on though – to my mind at least – is what to do with the little blighter once you get him or her home. Yes, you learn how to change a nappy/diaper. But besides that, you’re pretty much on your own, or at the mercy of Gina Ford.

And so it goes with the LEI. In the rush to get the new standard of the ground – and the progress has been remarkable – what happens next has perhaps not received the attention it deserves. We are now all familiar with the registration process, the rules of the game and the costs of participation. What we’re less clear on, though, is how data quality will be ensured going forward, how we can be sure the LEI we are consuming is fully up to date, and what to do if it isn’t (or we suspect it isn’t).

Which is why we will be kicking off our A-Team 2013 Hot Topics programme with a special report and accounting webinar on the practicalities of adopting the LEI. The special report will be published before the end of the month, and will feature contributions from forward thinkers on how practitioners can act to ensure data quality once the LEI utility – the GLEIS – is fully operational.

The webinar will take place on February 27 and follows on from our highly successful webcast last October, which record numbers of you attended. We hope you can join us thus time.

Like last time, we’ll be joined by Bloomberg’s Peter Warms and Thomson Reuters’ Tim Lind, both of whom have invested a lot of time in understanding the impact of the emerging standard on financial institutions both on terms of its opportunities and its challenges. Chief among the latter is how practitioners should approach the LEI as it transitions from registration phase to maintenance phase, particularly since there is no compulsion for registering entities to keep their data up to date.

We will also be joined Feb 27th by European Central Bank’s Francis Gross and CEO of AVOX Mark Davies.

It promises to be a useful session and – we hope – a must-attend for all those preparing for the big day – next month’s launch of the LEI in earnest. If you’re reading this you’ll get a formal invite closer to the time. If you want to get it in your diary now, get in touch and we’ll pre-register you.

Now, don’t you feel calmer about the whole thing?

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