Asia-Pacific Tour Diary 3

From this region, whether you're a native, an expat or a visitor, you get to hear perspectives about financial industry operations, including data issues, that you might not otherwise have thought about.

With all the coverage Inside Reference Data and WatersTechnology do concerning the legal entity identifier (LEI), Solvency II, Basel III, Mifid, Emir and the Dodd-Frank Act in general, the constant among those regulations other than the LEI is consistent dates.

An executive in the Singapore office of a major pricing data provider pointed this out to me in an extensive conversation today. We arrived at this angle while discussing the LEI standard rules, and walking through when they might be finalized and take effect, and when that provider would thus be able to serve its customers with LEI in mind.

There's last month's European Financial Stability Board (FSB) workshop that yielded the idea of different levels of LEI data for consideration by the FSB's Expert Group, which in turn is due to present LEI proposals to the overall board by the end of this month. Then those proposals, if approved by the FSB, will go to the Group of 20. Meanwhile, in the US, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission has set an interim compliant identifier standard to tide the industry there over until Europe reaches its LEI decisions. The commission also has asked firms to submit for consideration as sources to identify swap counterparties, starting July 16.

So as countries worldwide work to find a common LEI standard they can all support, a few different decision or deadline dates hang in the air through the middle of this year. Sometimes, it takes a trip outside our home base of the US to realise that having a single target date for a regulatory update is what it takes to remove uncertainty about compliance.