Central Gestation

The importance of coordinating and centralizing data, high on the agenda for the industry's ongoing conversation with itself, as recently covered here, also rose to the fore in the conversations at our North American Financial Information Summit (NAFIS) in New York earlier this week.

Citi and JPMorgan, among other firms, have data centralization in place or underway - or are trying to improve upon centralization of data they already have in place - particularly for legal entity identifiers (LEIs).

"We make sure we make [LEI data] available globally, so we're really focused on compliance and controls around it," said Ari Marcus, head of entity data operations and institutional client and account technology at Citi, speaking at NAFIS.

JPMorgan set up a central location for LEIs, especially to link these identifiers to client data and issuer data, according to Robin Doyle, managing director, office of regulatory affairs at JPMorgan Chase, also speaking at NAFIS. "We source centrally so we can provide the LEIs to all the various areas of our organization, to have the reporting or do reporting on behalf of our clients," she said.

Data management as a whole is really "about managing the content," said John Bottega, a senior advisor and consultant to the EDM Council and principal at Data Management Advisory Services, while moderating a NAFIS panel on reference data's role in regulatory compliance. "Data management is also about unambiguous shared meaning across our operations so we fully understand the essence of the data and then allow technology to be the all-important enabler." The industry, Bottega added, is "pretty good" at capturing, processing and moving data, but not as good at understanding the meaning of data.

To assemble more meaningful data, more movement of data between silos within firms is necessary, says Ed Ventura, president of Ventura Management Associates. "Companies that take the time to cross-pollinate those silos can leverage some of the work that they're doing on the compliance side with some of the business needs," he says. "Part of data governance is getting people to talk to one another - making sure that operations and technology are in tune with marketing, sales and the rest of the business."

Eliminating silos, or at least opening them up to compare the data they hold, can prevent, as Citi's Marcus described, "having different siloed organizations mapping LEIs to local IDs and then using that for different regional purposes."

The LEI is only one area to centralize, of course, and the aforementioned silos can occur with, or hinder collection of, any kind of data. It will be interesting to watch whether the new focus on centralizing data will improve business functions and regulatory compliance capability in the industry.