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It’s MiFID Mania

We first got wind of the MiFID directive at an industry roundtable discussion about reference data a little while back. There, our old friend Colin Wright of the Information Providers User Group (IPUG) innocuously raised the question of transparency for internally matched trades. The look of puzzlement on the faces of the industry practitioners at…

Shipperlee Rejoins S&P as European MD for Risk Solutions

Stuart Shipperlee is rejoining Standard & Poor’s as its new European managing director for the Risk Solutions division, based in London. Shipperlee, who will report to Gary Kearns, global leader for Credit Risk Services, was previously managing director of European operations for U.S. insurance ratings agency AM Best, and before that spent 10 years at…

Standards: Are They Worth the Effort?

Much of the industry talk about reference data focuses on standards, and much work has been done to develop and propagate them. But is this work worth the effort? If the industry does not adopt the standards, they are, obviously, of no use. ISO 15022 for corporate actions is a current example of a standard…

CSFB Latest Firm to Use DTCC’s Corporate Actions Service

Credit Suisse First Boston has become the sixth company to sign up for the Global Corporate Actions Validation Service from the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation (DTCC). Joseph Porcello, director of asset servicing for CSFB in the U.S., says, “By signing on to GCA Validation, we’re looking to eliminate the time-consuming, manual process of reconciling…

Bear Stearns to Implement GemStone For Risk Data Latency

Bear Stearns plans to implement GemFire Enterprise from data infrastructure company GemStone to manage in-memory data across its enterprise applications, initially focused on Global Clearing and Settlement Risk Analytics as well as Program Trading. Bear Stearns realised its daily batch-oriented risk reporting was coming under strain as trading volumes increased and regulatory requirements became more…

Progress Made, But More Needed For Difficult, Dull, Deadly CAs

Difficult, dull and deadly – that was how corporate actions were described at a breakfast seminar held by CityCompass earlier this month. Of course, we don’t necessarily agree with the full statement, but difficult they certainly can be. Progress is being made, however, towards the automation of corporate actions processing, reported participants of the event….

EUSD: Are You Ready? By Gary Wright, MSI, Managing Director, CityCompass Research

For those not quite up to speed, EUSD stands for the European Union Savings Directive and it impacts just about all financial services firms who act as collecting or paying agents in capital markets within the European Union. These paying agents – including banks, building societies, corporations issuing bonds that pay interest on certain instruments…

Counterparty Link Raises the Bar For Counterparty, Entity Data

The launch a few weeks ago of a new company and eponymous data product, CounterpartyLink, signifies the growing demand for counterparty and legal entity data, fuelled by increasingly stringent regulatory requirements. To date, the main source of legal entity data has been Dun & Bradstreet’s Duns numbers, and more recently the joint Crosswalk initiative it…

Survey Finds Cost, Regulatory Compliance Key Drivers

A recent survey, conducted by Sun Microsystems and Morse, found that cost reduction and regulatory compliance are the key drivers of current business strategy. The findings are in line with those of A-Team’s survey Reference Data Now, commissioned by Reuters and available on their website (http://about.reuters.com/datascope). The Sun survey, conducted among 50 financial institutions, consultants,…

The Need for Governance in Data Centralization Projects Selected extracts of a white paper by Steve French, Azimuth Financial

Many organizations have attempted to create centralized data groups (CDGs) responsible for sourcing, maintaining and distributing core data to all departments. There are clear reasons for doing this: efficiency, consistency, data quality, risk and regulatory compliance. However, despite all of these drivers, very few organizations have created CDGs. Of the top 20 investment banks (as…