Social media is a wonderful thing. It’s how I know that an industry friend is gallivanting around Australia. Or making an intriguing connection with another industry friend. Or has got a new job.
This week, LinkedIn yielded a couple of interesting snippets. As you’ll have seen, Kate Toumazi has moved to the new role of global head of risk and data services in Thomson Reuters’ Pricing and Reference Services leadership team within the company’s risk division. She was until recently global head of front office in the Enterprise Content leadership team.
Elsewhere, we hear the scintillating news that Brian Okupski has been managing director of managed services, a role he took on early in the year. Okupski, who in a previous life ran reference data at Bloomberg, was most recently head of reference data at Markit. In his new role, he’ll be building on Markit’s expanding portfolio of managed services, the most visible of which in our world is Markit EDM’s venture with iGate to provide managed reference data services.
Whether this is an expansion of the existing managed services ‘dream team’ of former Cadis CEO Dan Simpson and former UBS CIO Michele Trogni, remains to be seen. But it does point to the growing momentum for using shared services to drive operational efficiency, lower risk and improve service levels.
Needless to say, we’ll be looking at how mutualisation of effort through utility or other managed services models can help firms achieve their reference data cost and service goals at our Data Management Summit in New York on May 13, just a couple of weeks away.
Our 1pm panel Towards a Utility Model for Reference Data will explore whether a utility-based reference data model can deliver on its promise of greater functionality at lower cost. Joining our moderator, Sarah Underwood, will be IBM Global Business Services’ Christopher Rigg, SmartStream’s Joseph Turso, Bloomberg PolarLake’s Roy Williamson, and Euroclear’s Martijn Groot, co-author of our most recent survey and white paper on the topic, which is downloadable for free.
Bigger picture, though, it’s the people side of the business that makes our industry the dynamo that it is, which is why we’ve endeavoured to create a community feel at our industry events. I think we’ve succeeded in London, where DMS has become the place where reference data and data management people come to meet and exchange war stories. May 13 is our inaugural New York event, and judging by the lineup of talent speaking and on panels, I think it’s a great start to doing the same there.
Too bad I’ll miss the day.
Subscribe to our newsletter
