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

Reference Data Rather Than Alcohol?!

Subscribe to our newsletter

Yesterday’s panel session on a reference data utility was surprisingly well attended, given the fact it was last thing on the first day of the conference and drinks were being served outside on the exhibition floor. Testament to the importance of the subject in an environment where everybody is waiting for the regulator’s hammer to fall, delegates listened attentively to panellists debating the practicalities of establishing such a utility for instrument and entity data.

Reprising his usual argument for a “thin” utility, the European Central Bank’s head of external statistics Francis Gross championed the cause alongside EDM Council managing director Mike Atkin. Both discussed the potential of a role for Swift and the ISO process in the endeavour, as a market neutral body that could represent its industry demographic. Perhaps next year, as well as having a main session on reference data, Swift will also have a speaker on the panel itself? Given its push in the legal entity identification space with the Bank Identifier Code (BIC), such representation would make sense.

Keen to distance these efforts from the failure of the International Business Entity Identifier (IBEI) several years ago, Atkin contended that a regulatory mandate would overrule the need for a business case to convince the industry to adopt entity identification standards.

However, Northern Trust’s senior vice president of operations and technology Kay Vicino warned that such regulation could also pose a potential threat to the industry if the impacts are not carefully considered beforehand. “Financial institutions really need to get engaged in the process in order to feed back to the regulators and ensure there is some level of clarity around exactly what is required in terms of reporting to the Office of Financial Research, for example,” she said.

Vicino stressed the potential costs of mapping to a whole host of new regulatory imposed entity and instrument identifiers. “We absolutely do not want to have lots of different reference data utilities to report to and pull data from, there should only be one. If there is more than one, the costs could be unsustainable,” she said.

But this also raises a contentious issue: where should such a utility be based? Would Europe be happy with a US-based utility? What are the legal implications of data transfer across jurisdictions?

Unsurprisingly therefore, issues such as data privacy and liability cropped up during the debate. Meredith Gibson, Citi director and legal counsel, suggested that data sharing would open up a legislative can of worms if these issues were not dealt with at the outset.

The topic of systemic risk itself and the seemingly fluid definition of what it constitutes is another point of concern for the industry, agreed the practitioner panellists. The degree of uncertainty with regards to regulation around monitoring systemic risk is tied up with the concept of a utility in many minds and firms are rightly concerned about the future. This adds the structure and operation of such a utility to the long list of regulatory unknowns in the pipeline.

Vicino elaborated upon a wish list for such a utility for the regulator to deliver on: “It needs to provide global consistency and clarity. It needs to be pragmatic, so that the industry does not have to do a lot of duplicative work. Regulators also need to engage the industry at an early stage to understand the full impact and requirements.”

SIX Telekurs’ head of marketing Ivo Bieri added that, potentially, a vendor could be the facilitator of such a utility. Given DTCC is already rumoured to be in talks with the powers that be about the Office of Financial Research, he may just be right.

Subscribe to our newsletter

Related content

WEBINAR

Upcoming Webinar: Streamlining trading and investment processes with data standards and identifiers

3 June 2025 10:00am ET | 3:00pm London | 4:00pm CET Duration: 50 Minutes Financial institutions are integrating not only greater volumes of data for use across their organisation but also more varieties of data. As well, that data is being applied to more use cases than ever before, especially regulatory compliance and ESG integration....

BLOG

BlueFlame AI Brings Light to Opaque Private Markets

Private markets are relative newcomers to digital transformation, despite being rich in data drawn from the corners of the economy that the more technologically advanced public markets can’t reach. The founders of young start-up BlueFlame AI recognised this gap in the financial services market and have created a generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) platform that enables...

EVENT

RegTech Summit London

Now in its 9th year, the RegTech Summit in London will bring together the RegTech ecosystem to explore how the European capital markets financial industry can leverage technology to drive innovation, cut costs and support regulatory change.

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...