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

Recorded Webinar: Best practices for data lineage and metadata management to support evolving data operations

Data lineage is key to tracking data from source to consumption and any changes to the data along the way. Metadata management provides governance and control, ensuring high quality, consistent and accurate data across a financial institution. It can be used at all levels of an organisation from the C-suite to data stewards, analysts and...

BLOG

EU Regulatory Priorities and the Data Management Response Going into 2023

Regulation and data go hand in hand, but where will the hotspots be in 2023? To find out about imminent EU regulatory priorities with a significant impact on data management we talked to Dr David Doyle, an EU financial services regulatory expert, and frequent speaker at A-Team Group conferences. EMIR Refit reporting standards On 7...

EVENT

RegTech Summit APAC

Now in its 2nd year, the RegTech Summit APAC will bring together the regtech ecosystem to explore how capital markets in the APAC region can leverage technology to drive innovation, cut costs and support regulatory change. With more opportunities than ever before for RegTech to add value, now is the time to invest for the future. Join us to hear from leading RegTech practitioners and innovators who will share insights into how they are tackling the challenges of adopting and implementing regtech and how to advance your RegTech strategy.

GUIDE

Regulatory Data Handbook 2022/2023 – Tenth Edition

Welcome to the tenth edition of A-Team Group’s Regulatory Data Handbook, a publication that has tracked new regulations, amendments, implementation and data management requirements as regulatory change has impacted global capital markets participants over the past 10 years. This edition of the handbook includes new regulations and highlights some of the major regulatory interventions challenging...