Asset Control’s decision to open an office in Tokyo – announced today – stems from a heightened level of interest both from the Japanese financial centre’s major banking institutions and the key service agents that provide trading-related capabilities to much of the domestic market.
The data management platform provider has announced plans to bolster its Asian presence with the appointment of industry veteran Hidet Kobayashi as country manager for Japan. Hidet previously was with a major supplier of trading and risk management software, and also spent time at Thomson Reuters. According to Asset Control global sales head John Mitchell, the company has its Asian headquarters in Hong Kong and also operates a partner office in Beijing.
Mitchell says Asset Control identified an opportunity in Japan as the country’s major financial institutions begin to take steps to address the new regulatory framework emerging from the US and Europe, in the form of Dodd Frank and Basel III, respectively. “The megabanks are already implementing their solutions,” he says, “and we expect this to cascade down to domestic institutions.”
Specifically, Mitchell says, financial institutions in Japan are realizing the need to assess risk across business silos, asset classes and geographies, all of which require a greater focus on the underlying data sets. Asset Control sees an opportunity in providing the infrastructure to help firms address these data management issues.
While these drivers have been emerging for some time, the tipping point according to Mitchell came when Japanese service providers, which include the likes of Nomura Research Institute (NRI) and NTT Data, starting issuing RFPs for data management solutions. This, Asset Control considered, represented a clear signal that a broader swathe of the Japanese marketplace had realized the need to implement more robust approaches to data management and data governance.
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