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

Slinging Our Hook to Singapore and SIBOS

Subscribe to our newsletter

A palpable sigh of relief was issued by all Swift types early this month when the organization reassured exhibitors, presenters and delegates that its SIBOS conference will go ahead as planned next month. SARS reared its ugly head (hopefully, one last time) with a case in Singapore, raising the spectre that SIBOS Singapore might be cancelled a second time – the first being two years ago, immediately after the September 11 atrocities. Happily, that’s not the case, and Swift moved quickly to state that the show must indeed go on.

With Singapore 2001 having been cancelled, Singapore 2003 has it all to prove and, despite the SARS scare, expectations are running high. Part of this also relates to the mild recovery many are starting to feel in the marketplace. Could SIBOS be the catalyst for an increase in tempo generally for the messaging, STP and reference data aspects of the overall financial IT business? Meanwhile, closer to home, in London and New York, we continue to focus on more mundane ponderables. In discussions with information management types at firms on both sides of the Atlantic, we’ve noticed a common irritant: the lack of clarity on where in the financial institution responsibility for reference data strategy and implemenation rightfully resides. On several occasions in the past month, market data managers – those most typically associated with the management of real-time information services for the trading room – have complained that reference data strategy and, more uncomfortably in some cases, administration is increasingly falling upon their already-overburdened shoulders. Intrigued, we asked more of our data management friends, and the answer was the same; or rather, it was different: there is no recognized function type that is seen as the reference data silo from one institution to the next. Curiouser still, we added a question to our interviews for this issue of Reference Data Review: when you sell product into institutions, we asked a number of vendor product managers and sales people, who is it you sell to? The answer, consistently, is that it could be just about anyone and everyone. So where should reference data responsibility lie? So far, we’ve met CTOs, market data managers, STP project heads, all with assumed responsibility for descriptive data. It will be interesting to see how that responsibility shakes out as reference data projects gain more momentum. Meanwhile, back in Europe, that old chestnut ‘Telekurs Financial is for sale’ was doing the rounds. Every two years or so, this story sweeps through the marketplace, usually when Telekurs teams up with some or other vendor (we seem to remember talk about Standard & Poor’s being interested in an acquisition around the time the two got together on a co-marketing and sales agreement). Anyway, sorry to disappoint: Honcho Beat Koch, through a spokesperson, says it ain’t so. We’ll let you know if the situation changes. See you at Raffles!

Subscribe to our newsletter

Related content

WEBINAR

Upcoming Webinar: Unlocking value: Harnessing modern data platforms for data integration, advanced investment analytics, visualisation and reporting

4 September 2025 10:00am ET | 3:00pm London | 4:00pm CET Duration: 50 Minutes Modern data platforms are bringing efficiencies, scalability and powerful new capabilities to institutions and their data pipelines. They are enabling the use of new automation and analytical technologies that are also helping firms to derive more value from their data and...

BLOG

Accelex Says its AI Agent Can Tame The ‘Nastiest’ Corner of Data Management

Unstructured data is the bugbear of private market data managers, but one of the latest entrant to the space claims to have a solution that can tame the “nastiest” part of data retrieval – private market fund quarterly reports. Accelex is a London-based artificial intelligence (AI) focussed FinTech that has launched a platform that can prise market-relevant...

EVENT

Data Licensing Forum 2025

The Data Licensing Forum will explore industry trends, themes and specific developments relating to licensing of financial market data from Exchanges and Data Vendors.

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...