The decision by GoldenSource to map its enterprise data management (EDM) solution to the Financial Industry Business Ontology (FIBO) signals initial industry take up of the semantic standard, which GoldenSource suggests could go as far as becoming a regulatory requirement for reporting.
FIBO is an initiative of the EDM Council and describes in business terms contractual concepts for business entities, securities, derivatives, loans, market data, corporate actions and transactions. The aim is to provide a standard reference point for data alignment within financial services firms and across the industry, with a view to improving efficiency and transparency, and easing tasks such as regulatory reporting, internal risk management, compliance and analytics.
Michael Atkin, managing director of the EDM Council, explains: “FIBO interests regulators and financial institutions around the world as a common language for the structure of financial instruments, organisational relationships and obligations associated with transactions. This helps facilitate data alignment across the industry, validates data quality and reduces operational costs.”
GoldenSource’s commitment to FIBO starts with business entities and will be extended as further content is finalised by the EDM Council’s FIBO working party. The next FIBO addition will cover derivatives data and is expected to be available in the next couple of months. The GoldenSource solution includes Adaptive’s Metadata Manager, a web-based repository of FIBO information to which GoldenSource maps physical data in its EDM solution.
GoldenSource CEO, Mike Meriton, says: “The financial industry runs on data, but there are no standards around data and data management. The EDM Council is developing FIBO to provide standard terms and definitions for key data. Banks are beginning to adopt it and large regulators are considering using it and asking companies to use it for regulatory reporting. We have seen enough banks with an interest in FIBO to put the Adaptive tool into GoldenSource and there is a general view that this is the right way to go. The GoldenSource Open EDM architecture is FIBO enabled and ready to go.”
Meriton acknowledges that a move to FIBO will be a long journey, but suggests there are no other data standards developments with such a complete view of data and that languages such as XML and FpML lean towards communication protocols rather data standards.
He nods in the direction of the legal entity identifier as one element in the equation that will standardise data and says: “FIBO is a grand oversight of all forms of data banks want to use. Data can be captured and published with FIBO information and it can be consumed with FIBO information.”
While GoldenSource is the first EDM vendor to offer support for FIBO, Meriton expects the company’s competitors to follow suit. He concludes: “This is not a question of whether FIBO will be adopted, it is already being implemented by some banks, which is why we are starting to support it now.”
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