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Data Management Insight White Paper

The Case for a Reference Data Management Utility

Money, time, accuracy and quality have all been casualties of the extensive duplication of effort that has characterised the management of reference data management in the financial industry for as long as anyone can remember. The issue has become all the more acute in recent years by the growing complexity of financial markets and the...

Getting a Grip on Benchmark Contributions

A discussion of the issues surrounding bank-contributed market information for benchmarks and indexes. Recent scandals involving bank-contributed financial information – most notably 2010’s discovery of fraudulent contributions to the widely used the London Inter-Bank Offered Rate (LIBOR) benchmark – have underscored the lack of transparency and lack of control of the rates and prices financial...

Legal Entity Identifiers (LEIs) – There’s More to LEs Than Meets the I

Firms everywhere remain under sustained regulatory pressure to reduce systemic risk, in part through the improvement of their view of counterparty risk. At the same time, the ongoing economic climate is forcing them to reduce costs, leading them to consider alternative operating models wherever possible. The emergence of the global legal entity identifier (LEI) standard...

Getting Ahead in Fund Pricing

Faced with greater regulatory scrutiny, increasing workloads, more sophisticated client requirements and continued pressure on costs, fund administrators are heavily challenged to improve their operational efficiency across alternative and traditional funds to keep service quality levels high. With fund managers looking again to create new products, fund administrators are in a unique position to act...

Data Management – a Finance, Risk and Regulatory Perspective

With financial institutions acquiring international businesses – whether through mergers-and-acquisitions activity or organic growth – crossborder trading and investment has become the norm. But with it comes a new level of complexity, as firms grapple to deal with multiple regulatory regimes, market conventions and business definitions. On top of this, the changing regulatory landscape is...

Valuing High-Yield Corporate Credit in the New Regulatory Environment

The 2013 regulatory environment is putting increased pressure on valuations for speculative-grade corporate credit, namely high-yield bonds, leveraged loans and collateralized loan obligations (CLOs). Not only is the final price under greater scrutiny, financial firms will now be required to defend their methodologies on harder-to-price securities. With transparency having become the new regulatory buzzword, pricing...

Industrialising Investment Banking Technology

What does an industrialised bank look like? We are embarking on a journey already undertaken by many other industries as they matured. Using the automotive industry as an example, we see: Use of technology and lean processes to drive down costs Reduction in end-product complexity Increased regulation for a safer industry Extensive technology cross-licensing and...

Outsourcing Reference Data Management

The past 12 months has seen the emergence of new players offering Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) services for Reference Data Management. These new arrivals expand the range of options available to financial institutions for addressing the challenges of regulatory compliance, operational cost reduction and scalability. But BPO has other benefits, and innovative adopters have benefited...

Bloomberg Embraces the Legal Entity Identifier

The industry initiative to develop and promote a standard global legal entity identifier (LEI) is expected to significantly reduce the opacity associated with complex financial instruments, widely acknowledged to be a major contributing factor in the 2008 credit crisis. In this white paper, Bloomberg explains the implications of the emerging LEI for financial institutions, and...

Getting a Grip on Fragmented Risk Data – A Holistic Approach to Risk Information

This white paper is based on primary research by A-Team interviewing senior IT and Data Strategy managers at tier 1 and tier 2 banks. Risk management has been accepted as the new imperative for financial institutions of all types and sizes. But for Tier 1 and Tier 2 banks and brokerages, the complexity of their...