Time To Play Ball With Data

In the US, baseball spring training is underway in Florida and Arizona, with several teams' camps located in the Tampa-St. Petersburg area of Florida. Just as teams are solidifying lineups and plans for the season beginning in April, and getting their performance up to par before playing games that count on bigger stages, so is St. Petersburg, Fla.-based Raymond James Financial, a global firm, figuring out how to manage its data operations worldwide through work being done in friendly confines there.

Jennifer Ippoliti, chief data officer of Raymond James Financial, the subject of "Interview With..." in this month's issue of Inside Reference Data, is putting together pieces in an effort to improve the firm's data management functions, just as baseball general managers choose prospects and make trades to improve their teams. Those pieces, including client onboarding and client reporting, are to feed into a centralized security master in keeping with the centralization strategy Ippoliti and her colleagues are pursuing.

Centralization also figures in the way firms are reacting to the new regime of stress testing set out under BCBS 239 risk data aggregation principles in Europe (mirrored by CCAR in the US). Thomson Reuters began developing BCBS 239 compliance services by looking at data content in the aggregate, as John Eliseo, the company's metadata management head, says in "Shared Understanding." His group moved away from keeping duplicates of entity data and toward a core set of shared entity information, usable throughout the content ecosystem. EDM Council advisor John Bottega, in the same story, says simplification is needed, meaning extraction of the most important data from legacy systems.

Centralization actions also appear in this issue, with Datactics integrating entity, instrument and regulatory data together in its new application, Data Quality Manager; and in progress made by SwiftRef, which centralizes payments reference data, to provide this data to users through an application programming interface.

Elsewhere, in Europe, in Joanna Wright's feature, "Controlling the Flows," Robert Driver of the British Bankers Association points out an emerging issue with Basel III compliance-namely that the Basel Committee propagating the regulation has set new data reporting demands in the form of the Net Stable Funding Ratio and the Additional Liquidity Monitoring Metric, but leaves uncertainties about what these new requirements mean and whether the previously set deadlines for phased-in implementation can be met.

It's reminiscent of another regulatory issue I recently covered in an online column, "The IRS's Weak Tea", casting doubts on the US Internal Revenue Service's grasp on its administration of the Fatca foreign tax withholding regulation because of a lack of necessary updates to registration data. It's an open question whether the Basel Committee has a handle on its administration of Basel III, if that body is adding unclear reporting demands that are clouding which methods firms may use to comply.

In financial services operations, just as in baseball following its "Moneyball" data-driven transformation, you can't succeed without the benefit of correct and complete information. Whether this is obtained through centralization or by pressing for clarity on compliance data demands, it's an essential element to support management decisions.