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Always look on the bright side of life…

2008 will be the year when we see how serious firms are about reference data. This is a phrase I’ve borrowed from a leading industry observer because I think it aptly sums up the general thinking of those involved in reference data as the new year kicks off. Without wishing to be unnecessarily gloomy, the…

Desjardins Cleans Up Entity Data, Deploys SunGard Adaptiv Credit Risk

Desjardins Group has signed a three-year deal with CounterpartyLink for the provision of legal entity data as part of a larger counterparty and issuer risk project that will also see Desjardins – the biggest co-operative financial group in Canada – implement SunGard Adaptiv Credit Risk. CounterpartyLink’s data will first be used by Desjardins to ensure…

ICMA Ltd Renames, Builds Warehouse To Support New Information Services

Under its new name and governance, Xtrakter – the market services division of the International Capital Market Assocation (ICMA), formerly known as ICMA Limited – is targeting a higher profile as a data vendor. Xtrakter is gearing up to unleash a raft of new fixed income pricing and reference data products, and believes its legal…

A-Team Analysis: Time to Look for Alternatives to ISO for Standards?

Unrest among industry participants about the efficacy of ISO standards creation is reaching a peak as the failure of the formal process to keep pace with the reality of market requirements looks set to prompt a rethink about the best way to create standards for financial markets. Whether there is a better method for solving…

Tony Kirby Trades in Accenture for Ernst & Young

Tony Kirby has left Accenture – which he joined to work in its data management and managed reference data services business, but where he ultimately spearheaded much of the consultancy’s MiFID work – to join Ernst & Young as head of regulation and compliance.

Patent Pending Ref Data Utility Offers Risk Mitigation, Seeks Backers

The inventors of an ambitious plan to create a risk mitigating Reference Data Utility for the securities industry are entering a new phase of marketing for their business venture in the belief that financial institutions can be galvanised by the lure of reduced capital and collateral requirements into solving once and for all the age-old…

Laura Martinez of XSP Elected Vendor Co-Chair of ISITC Corporate Actions Working Group

XSP’s Laura Martinez, principal product manager, has been elected as vendor co-chair of the ISITC Corporate Actions Working Group. In this position, Martinez will collaborate with the group’s co-chairs and members to review ISO 15022 standards and direct enhancements to message content that promote STP for corporate actions. Martinez has been an active participant of…

Catherine Downhill Joins Fitch Ratings’ Global Business Development Team

Fitch Ratings has appointed Catherine Downhill as commercial director for Fitch’s Valuspread and Market Implied Ratings services. She joined Fitch on Monday December 10 and reports to Thomas Aubrey, managing director in Fitch’s Global Business Development team, London. Prior to joining Fitch, Downhill was most recently business manager for equity and fixed income evaluated pricing…

Omgeo Hires Matthew Nelson, Fritz McCormick to Research New Areas of Growth

Omgeo, the Thomson Financial/DTCC-owned provider of post-trade, pre-settlement services, has hired Fritz McCormick as data business director and Matthew Nelson as director, market intelligence. McCormick comes from GoldenSource where he was vice president of business development and alliances, and prior to that he worked at analyst Celent. Nelson comes from analyst TowerGroup, and counts a…

Taking the Risk Out of Mutual Fund Compliance By Jeff Levering, Vice President, NewRiver

Selling a mutual fund requires complex mutual fund information to be summarised down into data that sellers can understand, which is most often driven by a technology or data warehouse infrastructure. Missing and/or bad mutual fund data is nothing new, but it has recently garnered the attention of regulators as it was directly responsible for…