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The knowledge platform for the financial technology industry

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Talking Reference Data with Andrew Delaney: Three Reasons to Be (Cheerful) at DMS

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It’s taken a full week to recover from our Data Management Summit last week. More than 200 London market practitioners gathered to hear from a formidable cast of reference data and enterprise infrastructure characters.

It was an action-packed day, with plenty of news you can use (or could, if you were there), earnest discussion, and sometimes pithy comment. To cap it all, a hard-core group carried on the debate late into the evening at the lovely Revolution Bar on America Square, not that that had anything to do with depleted energy levels.

On the day, I had the pleasure of moderating the three livewire panel sessions – on enterprise risk architectures (full report, here), managing identifiers (full report, here) and emerging technologies (full report, here).

I also used the event to take the opportunity to present the results of our recent research on ‘Managing Risk Data in the Siloed Enterprise’ and ‘Big Data Solutions for Capital Markets – A Reality Check’ (ditto).

For me, though, three personal highlights:

Highlight No. 1 was Raj Subramani’s keynote. The JP Morgan vice president’s walk-through of his project to build an on-demand risk and P&L reporting system, struck right at the heart of our original vision for the event, addressing as it did the challenges of developing a comprehensive solution to a thorny problem – in terms of technology, governance and the inevitable internal wrangling.

Highlight No. 2 was Tom Secunda’s phone call – mid-session – to brief us on Bloomberg’s acquisition of PolarLake, a firm we’d already tagged as one to watch in the enterprise data space. Secunda told us of Bloomberg’s plan to use the PolarLake platform as the catalyst for a data validation utility that hopes to take layers of cost – in terms of duplicated effort – out of the reference data, pricing and corporate actions processing segments (full report, here). It’s an ambitious plan, and one we’ll be keeping a close eye on here at www.ReferenceDataReview.com.

Highlight No. 3 – and, to me, what we’re truly all about – was learning the price tag of Markit’s recent acquisition of Cadis Software (full report, here). As you’ll be aware, Cadis was something of a dark horse, whose star has been rising for some time. Markit’s well-timed pounce – at a reputed cost north of £100 million – may have pre-empted Bloomberg’s, all of which underscored the importance of data management and – to our delight – the relevance of our Data Management Summit.

To misappropriate Jerzy Kosinksi (author, The Painted Bird, and Telephone Bar hanger-out): it’s all about Being There. And if you can’t be there, you’ve got www.ReferenceDataReview.com.

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