Following the establishment of its new subcommittee on data standardisation under the auspices of its Technology Advisory Committee (TAC) in June, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) has announced that the first public meeting of the new group will take place at 1pm (EDT) on 5 August at the regulator’s conference centre facilities in Washington. The subcommittee, which was first announced back in May and is chaired by CFTC chief economist Andrei Kirilenko, is due to provide an update of its recent achievements and its future plans for its various working groups.
The new subcommittee is planning to conduct at least three sessions this year, which include this summer meeting and two more in the autumn and winter, all of which will be open to the public. In terms of internal structure, the subcommittee comprises four working groups: product and entity identification; semantic representation of financial instruments; machine readable legal documents, and storage and retrieval of financial data, all of whom will provide input during the 5 August meeting.
CFTC commissioner Scott O’Malia, who is chair of the TAC, will make the opening statements alongside Kirilenko and Nancy Doyle of the Office of General Counsel will provide an overview of the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA). FACA is essentially a piece of legislation to ensure that advice by the various advisory committees formed by regulators is objective and accessible to the public.
Kirilenko will provide brief guidance on the content and process for the four individual working groups, after which break out sessions will cover the topics that each of these groups are currently working on. To this end, attendees can expect to hear much about the recent legal entity identification (LEI) progress, the proof of concept work that the EDM Council has been presenting to the CFTC and the Treasury’s Office of Financial Research (OFR).
The subcommittee has been tasked with developing recommendations regarding a standardised reference data depository that would represent the universe of legal and financial terms used in describing, defining, and valuing various derivatives and other financial instruments. It is working in concert with the OFR in developing and mandating universal entity, product and instrument identifiers. The goal of all of this work is to provide greater consistency in the collection, reporting, and management of individual transactions, underlying legal documents (including master agreements and credit support agreements), and risk exposures.
More details, including a dial in, are available on the CFTC’s website here.
Subscribe to our newsletter
