Golden Copy: What To Listen For At NAFIS

Our agenda for next week's North American Financial Information Summit (NAFIS) conference in New York, in the reference data stream portions of the program, promises to explore the latest ideas about data governance, regulatory compliance, legal entity identifier (LEI) adoption, and the use of managed services.

It will be interesting to hear how the discussions reflect the broader evolution of reference data management operations over the past few years, particularly the financial services industry's increased consciousness and awareness about such data operations issues.

Will this progress continue and will it push the industry to improve data accuracy and accessibility, to ensure data consistency and transparency, to successfully address compliance demands, and increase adoption of data management services that will yield value through greater processing efficiency and greater accuracy? The sessions on our agenda for May 18 should provide a barometer of this progress, as well as a clear idea of how much that is leading to improvements being achieved through data operations.

Since last year's NAFIS, consciousness of the importance of reference data has spread into new areas in the financial services industry, namely blockchain and tracking sanctions on securities. As noted in last week's column, the distributed ledger technology supporting blockchain is itself a new form of reference data, and that technology is starting to be used for existing reference data functions such as corporate actions—and could end up being applied to more data operations functions.

Regarding sanctions information, the process of doing due diligence on sanctions activity that may affect investments and assets requires management of global sanctions lists and continual updates to those lists, as BlackRock's global lead for sanctions, David Peyman, observed in his keynote presentation at a briefing event we hosted this week with support from SIX Financial Information. These lists and their updates are really a new category of reference data.

These newer reference data realms may not be explicitly specified on the NAFIS agenda, but don't be surprised if they come up, if not during panel discussions, then during the conversations attendees are having offstage during the event.