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

Institutions Must Keep a Close Watch on Their Vendors, Says Credit Suisse’s Largier

Subscribe to our newsletter

Financial institutions need to be proactive in the management of their vendor relationships, said Peter Largier, global head of reference data analysis and projects at Credit Suisse. “You need to professionally evaluate the service you are getting from your data vendors,” he told delegates to FIMA 2008.

Largier focused his session on how to get the most out vendor relationships via the introduction of formal procedures and discussions. “There is a need for a formal RFP and you should ask for test data to check their product and market coverage,” he continued. “A range of considerations need to be taken into account when deciding on a data vendor, including areas such as the number of individual licenses needed, whether outsourcing providers and third parties have access to the data and contract expiry arrangements – will you still have access to the data you need once it has expired?”

However, the process does not stop there, once institutions have chosen a data provider, they must then carefully monitor the data produced. “Once you have signed up, you also need to regularly check up on service levels via meetings once a month,” Largier continued. He propounded the benefits of best practices in the area of vendor communication via a single global contact and a “partnership” approach.

“There should be a consolidated list of issues that are outstanding with regards to data across the institution and these should be fed back to vendors via a formal procedure on a monthly basis,” he said. “Actions must be set to improve the quality of data and the service in minuted meetings and these documents must be distributed to senior management to keep them abreast of developments.”

Dependencies on individual vendors must be limited via standardisation of interfaces and making sure that proprietary formats are kept to a minimum, he warned. “This means that if you have to change vendors, it is a much less complex procedure.”

Subscribe to our newsletter

Related content

WEBINAR

Recorded Webinar: End-to-End Lineage for Financial Services: The Missing Link for Both Compliance and AI Readiness

The importance of complete robust end-to-end data lineage in financial services and capital markets cannot be overstated. Without the ability to trace and verify data across its lifecycle, many critical workflows – from trade reconciliation to risk management – cannot be executed effectively. At the top of the list is regulatory compliance. Regulators demand a...

BLOG

Data’s Evolution Continues From Cost to Core Asset: DMS New York City 2025 Preview

Modern Chief Data Officers are not only the guardians of financial institutions’ data estates, they are also the caretakers of their single-biggest asset. With every part of an organisation’s business now dependent on data, the custody of its digital information is every bit as critical to operations as the management of trading teams or even...

EVENT

Data Management Summit New York City

Now in its 15th year the Data Management Summit NYC brings together the North American data management community to explore how data strategy is evolving to drive business outcomes and speed to market in changing times.

GUIDE

Regulatory Data Handbook 2025 – Thirteenth Edition

Welcome to the thirteenth edition of A-Team Group’s Regulatory Data Handbook, a unique and practical guide to capital markets regulation, regulatory change, and the data and data management requirements of compliance across Europe, the UK, US and Asia-Pacific. This year’s edition lands at a moment of accelerating regulatory divergence and intensifying data focused supervision. Inside,...