About a-team Marketing Services
The knowledge platform for the financial technology industry
The knowledge platform for the financial technology industry

A-Team Insight Blogs

ING Investment Management Has Banned the Term ‘Golden Copy’, Says Murphy

Subscribe to our newsletter

Proving that for some institutions the approach to data management is changing dramatically, Nick Murphy, data specialist for pricing and evaluations at ING Investment Management, told delegates to last week’s FIMA that his own firm has banned the term “golden copy” from use. The focus is on maintaining centralised and standardised data for instruments, but it is also about meeting the requirements of the internal business users, he said.

The number one priority for data management is to get recognition of the fact that reference data is an asset to an organisation, said Murphy, reprising a theme that many other speakers elaborated upon at this year’s FIMA. It is often undervalued by the business and quality is frequently sacrificed to lower costs, he said.

Other priorities at the moment include coping with the globalisation and standardisation of data by tackling the issue of data governance (a point also raised by fellow buy side representative from UBS Ian Webster) and the continual challenge of dealing with a siloed environment. In order to help it deal with this environment, the firm is currently implementing a new data management solution from Cadis for its static and market data, which Murphy hopes will allow it to better judge data completeness and accuracy.

“Everywhere I have worked I have seen the difficulties caused by letting end users change or create classifications downstream,” he said. “Changing data fields and attributes at the individual business level causes a lot of complexity down the line.” By having a centralised structure to monitor data quality across the institution, Murphy anticipates that some of these problems can be picked up more easily.

Firms also need to draw up quality indicators on data to check whether their requirements are being met by vendor systems and internally built solutions, he suggested. To this end, Murphy is keen to draw up internal client service level agreements (SLAs) in order to ensure data quality is being maintained.

Murphy noted that vendors have been slow to properly service the needs of the buy side, however, many firms are also unsure about the requirements of their own internal end users. “The industry has to be brave but cautious about what we opt to do with vendors in a managed services environment, for example,” he said. “You don’t want to give away control over your data quality.”

So, vendors may have their faults, but they can be useful partners in bringing technology expertise to the table, according to Murphy. “Don’t bash your vendors too much,” he joked. “They are people too.”

Subscribe to our newsletter

Related content

WEBINAR

Upcoming Webinar: Navigating a Complex World: Best Data Practices in Sanctions Screening

5 November 2025 10:00am ET | 3:00pm London | 4:00pm CET Duration: 50 Minutes As rising geopolitical uncertainty prompts an intensification in the complexity and volume of global economic and financial sanctions, banks and financial institutions are faced with a daunting set of new compliance challenges. The risk of inadvertently engaging with sanctioned securities has...

BLOG

Making the Most of Mainframe Structured Data: Webinar Preview

Mainframes still provide the data and computational backbone of many financial institutions but some organisations are encountering challenges as they try to integrate them with newer architectures. Many are incompatible with cloud and server-based architectures as well as APIs. Work-arounds can be achieved but they require middleware that can be costly and time consuming to...

EVENT

TradingTech Summit London

Now in its 15th year the TradingTech Summit London brings together the European trading technology capital markets industry and examines the latest changes and innovations in trading technology and explores how technology is being deployed to create an edge in sell side and buy side capital markets financial institutions.

GUIDE

AI in Capital Markets: Practical Insight for a Transforming Industry – Free Handbook

AI is no longer on the horizon – it’s embedded in the infrastructure of modern capital markets. But separating real impact from inflated promises requires a grounded, practical understanding. The AI in Capital Markets Handbook 2025 provides exactly that. Designed for data-driven professionals across the trade life-cycle, compliance, infrastructure, and strategy, this handbook goes beyond...