DATA QUALITY, DATA INTEGRITY AND DATA COMPLETENESS
R&C: What do you consider to be the biggest data-related challenges currently facing firms?
Shea: In today’s regulatory environment, an investment firm needs to collect, validate and normalise data from multiple sources to satisfy compliance and transaction reporting obligations. Firms are expected to deliver timely reports using industry standard identifiers, for example legal entity identifiers (LEIs), for securities, counterparties, decision makers and accounts related to the transaction. Often, a heavy technical investment is required to integrate multiple systems which contain the data necessary to comply with the regulation. In addition to trade reporting obligations, firms are expected to implement a process to ensure that pre- and post-trade compliance checks are evaluated with timely data. A sophisticated design must be implemented so that security reference data can be acquired in near ‘real-time’, which will enable compliance checks to be run as new orders or trades are sent out for execution.
Lanois: As strange as it may seem, one of the biggest data-related challenges companies face is the hype surrounding new technologies. We have all heard, many times, how a new technology is poised to be the next best thing, and this has often pushed organisations into blind adoption just for the sake of appearing trendy and not losing out to their competitors, only for those tools or technologies to be dropped by those organisations, at great expense, shortly thereafter because the tool or technology does not really meet the company’s needs. There is nothing wrong with being an early adopter and in adopting new technologies which, in many cases, can greatly benefit your business. There can be many benefits, such as reduced costs, as well as increased speed, efficiency or reliability of data. Nevertheless, adoption should always be carefully considered and must fit the organisation, not the other way around. Adopting the latest and greatest trend just because it is popular at the moment can be a huge mistake.
Jul-Sep 2018 Issue
Bloomberg L.P.
Credit Suisse AG