Rising Enthusiasm for New Data Sources

In "Surveying the Social Data Frontier," the Limra consultancy's regulation expert, Stephen Selby, points to the "subtext" of the new US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) disclosure guidance concerning social networking media postings. The SEC is recognizing that social media has arrived, and this story explores how that arrival may generate a lot more data that will populate reference databases in the future.

There's also another subtext running through the features in this issue of Inside Reference Data. That subtext, believe it or not, is enthusiasm for new sources of data. Chalk it up to greater pressure to manage risk, and therefore to continually improve upon the data resources available to do so.

In "Breaking New Ground," Nicholas Hamilton's update on the legal entity identifier, he writes that there "is no doubting the enthusiasm of pre-LOUs (local operating units) to start registering entities and issuing identifiers." The story details efforts to that end in Germany, Ireland, Russia and the US. The work of pre-LOUs is becoming more important because of continued uncertainty around the completion of the global LEI system. Pre-LOUs have been left with de facto responsibility for complying with provisions of the European Market Infrastructure Regulation (Emir) that require entity identification. That's just one example of where pre-LOUs have an opportunity for influence that gives them something to get excited about.

On another front, firms' front offices are creating an investment book of record (IBOR) in an effort to reconcile differences between the front office and portfolio accounting systems. "Brought to Book" looks at how demands for transparency and more effective reporting are fueling enthusiasm for implementing IBORs, which are deemed an advance on the practice of enterprise data management and are becoming a global trend.

When it comes to corporate actions, which are also greatly affected by risk management concerns, event automation has reaped the most enthusiasm to date, as reported in "Event Horizon." In this story, covering our most recent webcast, 55% of respondents to a poll said management of corporate actions events were automated in their processing, more than other functions such as position management, election management and entitlement calculation and posting. These other functions are more prone to manual exception, and therefore attract less enthusiasm for automation.

The same transparency demands promoting greater use of IBORs are also extending into evaluated pricing, as reported in "Building Confidence" on page 17. That attraction may even be causing firms to curb their enthusiasm for broker quotes, as Wells Fargo's Daniel Johnson said in the webcast covered in this feature. Evaluated pricing may be different than the other functions covered in this issue, in that regulation appears to be a greater driver for changes than risk management has been, as poll results from this webcast suggest. Whatever the source, undoubtedly enthusiasm is running high for most of these new data efforts-out of a recognition of their value to the industry.