The European Central Bank’s Centralised Securities Database (CSDB) could be used as the industry’s recognised source of business entity identifiers in the future, contended Soeren Kier Christensen, managing director of Finsoft Financial Systems. “Each institution needs a unique identifier and the CSDB currently tracks these for each European institution. By using these already standardised codes, the financial market could cut out a lot of the costs related to entity data management,” he said.
The CSDB project has been carried out by Finsoft in conjunction with the ECB and the database currently covers market data, instrument data, entity data and corporate actions. It also contains a comprehensive data dictionary and encompasses 5.1 million individual records, Christensen told FIMA 2008 delegates. The data management hub receives data from multiple sources and it is then cleansed, enriched and distributed to end users to allow for the calibration of statistics by the ECB, he continued.
“The system allows the bank to analyse data quality in real time and a large number of rules have been set to measure the relevant data aspects,” he explained. “Because it is based on an XML schema, it can be more easily extended to cover other financial instruments in the future.”
For entity identification purposes, the vendor has drawn up a translation table for the ECB in order to translate between the identifiers used by third party entity data providers. Christensen contended that because this set of identifiers covers the European market, it has the potential to be used by the financial institutions themselves in the future.
