It most certainly has. Busy, yes. But chock full of industry events, indeed more than we can realistically keep up with. The Mother Of All Events, though, has to be Sibos, and this year’s was a great success. We used Sibos’s handy Singapore location this year to make a trip east and make the most of the extraordinary facilities to spread the good word about A-Team and Reference Data Review.
And how useful Sibos turned out to be. We used the excellent exhibition to schmooze with people we don’t often get to see: John Bertrand and Andy White at Misys; Brian Robins and Mack Gill at SunGard; Rowland Dickens and Patrick McVeigh at Reuters; Nick Daniel and Ian Dunning at CB.Net; John Parker and Robert Thiele at Vitria; Nick Russen at City Networks; Nick Tonge at Trace Financial; Sven Thiele at Integra SP, lurking at the Tibco booth; Ian Kerr at Accurate Software; Steve Hughes at ACE Software; Eric van Caster at Smartstream Technologies; Don Haddow at Netik; Donal O’Brien and Mike West at ADP Wilco; Simon Freeman at Capco; Amery Thomas at Heliograph; Geoff Dixon at Double Helix; Timothy Lind at Towergroup, lurking at the Reuters stand; and Caroline Statman at GARP. All at one show! And we got the chance to show off our scoop in last month’s issue, being the only publication on display to have pre-empted the news of Swift’s decision to allow corporate actions data vendors to distribute their services via the Swift network (Reference Data Review, October 2003). Indeed, Swift used the show to make the official announcement. And at another trade event this month in New York – the Securities Operations Forum’s Sixth Annual Conference on Corporate Actions Processing – Swift’s Linda Bookheim offered more details, namely that the pilot, involving Telekurs, FT Interactive Data, Reuters and WM Datenservice began last month and will run until June 2004. At that point, Swift will consider at its AGM whether to create a new category of participant. Bookheim also said a new Corporate Actions Swift Ready Label had been created and that one investment management client was live, with five expected next year. Before toddling off to Swift, we somehow managed to swing by the World Financial Information Congress (WFIC), run by the Financial Information Services Division (FISD) of the Securities & Information Industry Association (SIIA) in Washington D.C., where Mike Atkin gave an update on the progress of the group’s various activities (much of which won’t be news to RDR readers). But it hasn’t been all work and no play. Along with Sibos and the Corporate Actions Processing conference, we got to spend time in Singapore, Indonesia, Hong Kong, London, New York. At every stopping point – even at the Angsana spa resort on the Indonesian island of Bintan – we got to chat about reference data with our growing network of RDR aficionados. It’s fast becoming a reference data world.
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