Reference data management is no longer at the fringes of an organisation in terms of the perception of its strategic importance by senior management, said Sean Taylor, director at Deutsche Wealth Management, to the delegation at Marcus Evans’ recent Reference Data conference last week. Taylor, who was chairing the event, indicated that increased regulatory scrutiny over the next 12 months will increase data management’s importance to firms even further.
“Data needs to be of a standard that doesn’t allow deep holes to be dug,” explained Taylor. “There will be winds of change throughout the financial markets over the next 12 months as the regulators begin turning over stones to find out what happened, why and how.”
He predicted that the US will see a regulatory crackdown on financial data by the end of the first quarter of 2009 and there will be a real requirement for golden copy as a result. “It will no longer be acceptable to have silos where the right hand does not know what the left is doing,” he added. “But data management will still have to fight to keep its share of the IT budget.”
Taylor warned that there will be “fighting at the money pit” for data management project funding this year and suggested that delegates learn from each others’ experiences to help them in their quest.
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