World Wide Wedges

North American and European data management services providers, like many in the overall financial technology services space, have long been looking for ways to break into other regions such as South America, Asia-Pacific, the Middle East and Africa, in particular the countries within these regions that are considered emerging markets.

Providers are finding that working with existing clients in North America and Europe, close to their home territories, who in turn have operations in these other regions, is a smoother way into such emerging markets. These clients want their providers to roll out the same services in those more faraway offices. Data management services provider Asset Control, now under the direction of a new CEO, Richard Petti, is taking this approach.

"They want to buy proven technology and methodology that gives them the ability to transmit trust to their customers and show that they are a reliable bank because they have solutions and processes in place," he says.

In markets including South Africa, the Ukraine and Turkey, Asset Control is finding new business with this viral method, according to Petti. But there is another dimension to spreading systems through clients, he explains.

When Asset Control has been brought into markets such as Brazil, it has been on the strength of an entire ecosystem of services, Petti says. Regulators and banking supervisors also need best-of-breed data systems, and end user firms follow that lead - not just for compatibility, but for the example of what works best, according to Petti.

Those who are counting on rollouts of services within the same major global firms to offices in other regions would hope that these would be seamless, like McCartney's "getting better all the time" lyric without Lennon's "couldn't get much worse" counterpoint. But the latter might be an apt summation of the inter-governmental fractures have surfaced with the US Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (Fatca). Separate individual Intergovernmental Agreements (IGAs) have been made, and will have to be made between the US and different countries. It's no surprise that only a couple handfuls of these are in place to date, since many countries' laws explicitly prohibit disclosure of financial information to foreign entities and governments. By pushing Fatca, the US has been swimming against the global tide of how financial data is handled.

What this ongoing regulatory implementation story tells us is that the "Western" regions of the industry - service providers and their clients alike -- may need to proceed with caution on grand plans to impose different systems and methods on foreign markets in other regions. It's possible that data systems that have worked well can yield improved data management elsewhere, but not entirely out of the question that idiosyncrasies of other markets could slow their adoption.