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RBC’s Sutton to Join Ex-Citi Colleague Berlanger at Deutsche Bank

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After two years as Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) Capital Markets’ global head of customer accounts, Julia Sutton is set to head to Deutsche Bank in October as its new head of client reference data. Sutton, who will be speaking at A-Team’s Data Management for Risk, Analytics and Valuations conference in London on 17 October, will join ex-Citi colleague Geert Berlanger, who joined Deutsche Bank in July as programme director for client business services, responsible for functions such as client onboarding.

During her time at RBC, Sutton has been overseeing the customer data management team’s efforts in EMEA and Asia Pacific. As she told Reference Data Review in February last year, the first order of the day was extending the automation of calendar data for the firm beyond equities and fixed income. She then kicked off efforts towards entity data cleansing, focusing on the core data of name, address, cross references between vendor codes and industrial classifications. Sutton also worked on implementing an onboarding portal for clients to lodge their documents with RBC and allow them to be more responsible for keeping them current.

Sutton has left the bank and her successor with a list of reference data issues that need to be tackled within RBC over the next two to three years. She worked with external consultants last year to help RBC define a list of priorities, which were distilled down into four distinct areas: gold copy, concordance, issuer ratings and KYC/AML.

Sutton joined RBC from Citi, where she was global head of customer accounts with responsibility for maintaining global account data and KYC for capital markets for more than three years, alongside colleague Berlanger. Prior to this, she was associate director at Barclays Capital for nearly 19 years.

At Citi, Sutton spent a long time developing a certified gold copy customer database in order to provide an intuitive, easy to use search system for end users. She worked with Microsoft FAST Search technology and Search Business Consulting (SBC) to integrate two customer information sources and achieve a golden copy record of this data earlier this year. The bank also implemented a reconciliation hub from software vendor Web Services Integration (WSI) in 2008: the Xceptor Product Suite Reconciliation Hub. The rollout was aimed at affording Citi more control over its data and increasing the time available for data analysis by automating its retrieval.

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