Attention Getters

Does it take a big blow-up to get traction on data management improvement, whether for data quality or making a data governance plan?

That's the question that kept surfacing on the margins of discussions at the Toronto Financial Information Summit this week.

Rares Pateanu, most recently an executive director at Morgan Stanley, tells us that where firms once may have revamped their data strategies in response to the 2008 financial crisis, the importance of being able to track holdings and transactions – in part through identifiers and reference data – may be getting forgotten.

Data strategy and governance initiatives require a culture of sharing within a firm that may not be valued, particularly considering the priorities of investment banking units, Pateanu added.

During a discussion covering the legal entity identifier – a response to the crisis and the means to address the problem of being unable to identify and track securities, which became so central – Pierre-Simon Rivest, senior policy advisor at Banque National du Canada, asked what would happen in the event of another major industry failure as occurred in 2008.

"How would this transparency work?" he said. "How would there be oversight to un-match transactions?"

As Hashmat Rohian, associate vice president, R&D – data science at Aviva Canada showed, one can track where employees from firms that failed in the crisis went simply by using LinkedIn. Tracking transactions themselves in such a crisis is undoubtedly harder, but it shouldn't take until the next meltdown for the industry to prepare itself – including the use of data transparency and sharing where necessary – to have the means to do so.