Regulations & Standards special report

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Setting the Regulatory Agenda

Last year, some market participants commented that financial regulators were the main recruiters of ex-bankers. This might not have been entirely true, but many regulators have indeed added more resources in recent years. There has been growing pressure to review regulatory requirements, impose greater oversight and push for increased transparency-often by enforcing reference data standardization.

In fact, standardization is the one issue all players in the market are trying to solve -and have been trying to solve for the past few decades. But although everyone seems to be talking about the same topic, there is still a long way to go. The market turmoil has now resulted in firms questioning if there is a need for immediate regulatory involvement to improve standardization and reduce the risk associated with poor data, or if regulatory involvement is not the right answer.

Yet, in some aspects, regulators have already tried to enforce data standards. Europe's MiFID includes references to standards, and UK regulator FSA recently fined Barclays Capital for transaction report errors, some of which related to failure to use correct identification for instruments and entities.

Still, while some claim regulators do need to impose the use of specific standards to ensure increased adoption, others suggest standardization should be left to the market. In this Regulation & Standards Special Report, which includes comments from industry experts and a news review, we hope to provide readers with an insight into the latest developments in the regulation and standards space.

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