Last week’s A-Team Group Data Management Summit covered hot topics from the evolution of the Chief Data Officer (CDO) role to the unfinished business of Markets in Financial Instruments Directive II (MiFID II), the outstanding data management challenges of General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and the potential of technologies including cloud, machine learning and artificial intelligence.
Andrew Delaney, chief content officer at A-Team Group, hosted the Summit and welcomed the event’s first keynote speaker, Gary Goldberg, CDO at Mizuho International. Goldberg made a compelling presentation covering the use of data to bring business together, a move from data governance to analytics, the evolution of the CDO role to version 4.0, and the need for all investments in data management to deliver operational gains.
Goldberg said: “There are huge opportunities in our industry that are waiting to be tapped. We now have the tools for the task and the CDO 4.0, a strategic partner to the business who is using data science and analytics, acting as an internal consultant to drive business strategy and seeking profitability.”
Regulation
Following the keynote, a panel of CDOs touched on current and forthcoming regulation and discussed their role in turning data that is often seen as a risk into an opportunity, and making data work for the business. The panel acknowledged that Day 1 of MiFID II on January 3, 2018 was not too stressful and turned its attention to the data management challenges of GDPR and Securities Financial Transaction Regulation (SFTR), which is expected to come into play towards the end of 2019.
Following panels detailed the unfinished business of MiFID II and the challenges of GDPR. Talking about MiFID II, John Mason, global head of regulatory and market structure propositions, Financial & Risk, at Thomson Reuters, said the outcomes of MiFID II include more than a trillion new data points, changes to exchanges and trading venues, and increased dependency on market data. Considering the extent to which regulators may reconsider elements of MiFID II now it is in play, he suggested that any divergence from the intentions of the regulation, and any inconsistencies created in the market, may require a regulatory review.
Mason also commented on the MiFID II Consolidated Tape Provider (CTP), saying that as regulators assess whether MiFID II is achieving its transparency expectations, the likelihood is that a CTP will become a mandatory demand rather than a request for an organisation to operate a tape.
Peter Moss, CEO at SmartStream RDU, focused on four critical MiFID II issues that need to be addressed by financial institutions this year: remediation, optimisation, control, and systematic internaliser (SI) identification.
A GDPR panel led by Garry Manser, head of data at governance at Visa, outlined the requirements of the regulation in the countdown to compliance and warned of the difficulties it presents. Colin Ware, regulatory product manager at BNY Mellon, said: “Identifying personal data and developing data lineage and governance for compliance are difficult. There is also the need to go back to the business to find out how data is captured and used.”
David Thomas, regulatory CDO at HSBC, said firms that pull together personal data, work out how they will respond to data enquires, and understand the roles and responsibilities of the regulation should achieve a minimal viable compliance solution, although whether this will be enough going forward remains to be seen.
Innovation
Innovation was a hot topic in the conference room, on the exhibition floor, and in a Data Innovation Showcase featuring The Investment Data Utility, Features Analytics and The Cyber Consultants.
At the leading edge, Chirag Patel, managing director and head of innovation and advisory solutions for EMEA at State Street Global Exchange and State Street Associates, presented on the potential and promise of artificial intelligence (AI). He described how emerging technologies could change the investment world.
A keynote delivered by data consultant Mady Korada, covered a case study of machine learning for trade anomaly detection at an investment bank. The outcome, said Korada, is trade monitoring that detects anomalies faster, more accurately and closer to where a trade occurs. Marion Leslie, managing director, Enterprise, at Thomson Reuters, presented an interactive keynote covering cloud trends and the challenges and realities of the technology.
Ending the conference with more questions than answers, Tom Dalglish, CEO at GadgIT, led a final panel looking at how to harness alternative data and next generation analytics. The panel defined alternative data as ‘unusual, unexpected types of data’ and noted about one thousand sources of the data, some of which are already being used by the buy-side and sell-side. Use cases of alternative data are emerging and financial firms taking advantage of the data are expected to benefit, but there is a caveat – for the moment at least, alternative data is not very mature, meaning it is difficult to map and integrate into existing data lakes.
In case you missed A-Team Group’s London Data Management Summit, we’ll cover some of the keynotes and panel sessions in more detail in the next couple of weeks. Our next Data Management Summit is in New York on September 20th, 2018.
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