As noted by Reference Data Review last month, the UK Financial Services Authority (FSA) has pledged to support the data vendor community in adapting to the new regulatory order and, accordingly, has set up an independent software vendor (ISV) discussion group to discuss liquidity risk requirements. The group’s first meeting was held on 16 February and a total of 13 vendors were in attendance, but where was the rest of the community? And what did they miss out on?
Those in attendance from the vendor community comprised: Axiom SL Europe, Centric, Corepro Solutions, Cornhill Consulting, Fernbach Software, Financial Architects, FRS Global, Logica, Lombard Risk, MPI Europe, SAS, Spring Programs and SunGard. As you can see, a number of big names are notable in their absence…
The goal of the meetings is to gather together vendor representatives and help them prepare for liquidity reporting through the Gathering Better Regulatory Information Electronically (Gabriel) system from June 2010. The Gabriel system is the regulator’s online regulatory reporting system for the collection, validation and storage of regulatory data, which is currently being altered to allow for the reporting of liquidity risk data as part of the FSA’s regime change in the space. To this end, the vendors present at the meeting were afforded a progress update on this project.
There are currently 41 firms on the list for the system testing due to begin on 1 June, confirmed FSA representatives, and the testing schedule for the 1 October tests will likely begin in late August or early September. The testing is to make sure that these vendor firms are ready to submit appropriately formatted XML data to the Gabriel system for their clients.
The FSA has warned that manual online or offline keying of data items, particularly for the FSA047 reports, will be “impractical for all but the simplest set of liquidity assets and liabilities”. This means the preparation of data in XML format is required, which can then be either submitted directly into Gabriel from a firm’s system or uploaded into Gabriel’s online forms for online submission. In order to provide more details on this process the regulator has created a technical pack that can be downloaded from its website here.
It has also created a data reference guide to set out the precise XML format of the data required, which is available to download here.
In addition, the FSA is proposing to make Excel templates available for the new data items, which will allow the Excel data to be saved in an XML format that can then be uploaded into Gabriel using the existing XML Upload mechanism. The Gabriel Excel templates for FSA047 and FSA048 reports have already been informally issued.
The next meeting of the ISV forum will take place on 30 March. Let’s hope the list of attendees is a bit longer next time.
The minutes of the last meeting are available to download here.
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