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Talking Reference Data with Andrew Delaney: Back to Work

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We’re back from Labor Day, August Bank Holiday and the Olympics (although the Paralympics continues here in sunny East London). It’s surely time to roll up the sleeves and get back to work.

The forthcoming ‘Fall Season’, as I like to call it, looks like it will be a busy one.

Everyone is in budget mode. Of course, budgets aren’t as generous as they may once have been (that’s a euphemism, I think). But the regulatory environment seems to be ensuring that financial institutions will have to make some investment in data and infrastructure.

Earlier in the year, our special report on Solvency II highlighted the data management requirement posed by this regulation.

While there seems to be some of the usual faffing about on the implementation date, the message is now being heard that Solvency II will have a significant impact on the data and risk management approaches of financial institutions way beyond the insurance market that it directly targets.

Indeed, we’ve seen a host of packaged data management solutions coming to market in preparation. So we expect some significant budgetary action in this space. If you’re not up to speed, take a look at our special report.

You may be aware that we’re in the throes of putting together another special report, this one on the legal entity identifier (LEI). As with Solvency II, the Dodd Frank regulation will require practitioners to act, this time on the adoption of the emerging identification standard for legal entities.

The marketplace has already had a glimpse of how this may look, with the recent launch of the DTCC and Swift’s CICI Utility.

Current timeframes expect full LEI deliverable starting from next March. And the message from our research in compiling our forthcoming LEI report is simple: Start work now. Precisely what kind of work is open to question, and you’ll have to wait for the report – due out this month – for some suggested approaches.

There’s much work to be done. Will it require Olympian effort? Might be a good thing, given how dead the City has been this summer.

Welcome back.

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