South Africa’s Standard Bank is at the start of its data management journey and has recently set up a data governance board to focus on the pertinent issues, according to Andy Simpson, head of international reference data at the bank. The reference data management function is now part of the bank’s operations team and although it has the responsibility to understand the usage of the data, it has not yet been put in charge of managing the data centrally.
“We have to make sure downstream users are able to use the data properly and provide them with the tools to understand the reference data that they require,” explains Simpson. Rather than acting as governors of a centralised data repository, Standard Bank’s reference data team is therefore working directly with end users in a distributed data management model.
The bank has, up until now, avoided rolling out a data warehousing solution and focused on understanding and working with end users around their data requirements, says Simpson. However, he is hopeful that now that there is greater understanding around the controls required for reference data management downstream, the prospect of a warehouse will be on the cards for the near term.
Simpson himself has just moved from being based in Standard Bank’s London offices to South Africa and has been given the additional responsibility of managing the bank’s counterparty data for South Africa and Africa, as well as its international counterparty and instrument data.
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