The EDM Council has been working in partnership with IT consultancy firm Headstrong to put together a global data management benchmarking survey, aimed at providing comparable metrics on the data management projects going on across the industry. The survey involved 65 firms and will be discussed at an upcoming launch event in New York in a couple of weeks’ time. In the meantime, the data management industry group has more than enough to be getting along with, given that the core of its semantics repository is nearing completion.
The industry group has been busy building on its semantics repository, which aims to standardise the terms and definitions of all reference data attributes stored in the master files of financial institutions, over the last couple of years and reference data terms for traded securities have been elevated to “beta” status. The initiative is now focused on the world of derivatives and terms for OTC derivatives, pricing and analytics are next in line for completion. Following the summer break, the group is therefore re-launching its related subject matter expert reviews to drive this work forward.
According to the EDM Council, a number of members are also using the repository as a basis on which to structure the upgrading of their own metadata repositories. The logic being that they are able to more easily deploy common data models within their institutions or consolidate their existing data resources by using the attributes contained within the semantics repository itself.
The group has also been working on a reference data proof of concept since August 2009 to demonstrate the viability of tagging financial contracts using standard semantics, based on its repository, and identifiers in support of risk analytics. Since last year, the group has worked alongside IBM and a number of other interested parties to document and define the mortgage backed securities (MBS) securitisation process from a data management point of view. The MBS semantic data model is now being incorporated into the repository and will be ready for industry comment in the next month, according to the group.
Given its championing of the National Institute of Finance (NIF) before its evolution into the Office of Financial Research, the EDM Council is also keenly involved in the discussions regarding the development of the US-based reference data utility. To this end, it is seeking input from its members in order to provide feedback to the regulatory community on reference data standards, including tags, identifiers and semantics.
The benchmarking report will be released on 15 September at an event in New York and will be followed by a presentation by Mike Atkin, managing director of the EDM Council, who will discuss the quantitative and qualitative findings, and a panel discussion. Check out the EDM Council website here for more details.
