What is Reference Data Management?
Reference data management is a process that drives efficiency across the market by maintaining high data quality standards.
What does reference data management provide?
It provides full terms and conditions data, including ratings and descriptive content, for each asset type.
Reference data maintains extensive market-level and issue-level industry standard numbering codes. These are associated with each equity instrument including official clearing code identifiers (SEDOL, CUSIP, ISIN, CINs, Local Exchange codes MIC).
Type of Reference Data:
Reference data includes static and dynamic.
Static Reference data – Data elements that have unalterable characteristics.
E.g.:
• Financial products specifications and expiration dates
• Information about counterparties and supply chain partners.
Dynamic reference data – Variable data such as closing and historical prices.
Why is reference data management required?
The market data for a particular instrument includes:
• An identifier of the instrument and
• Where it was traded – such as the ticker symbol and exchange code
• The latest bid and ask price and the time of the last trade
• Volume Traded
• Bid and offer sizes
• Static data about the financial instrument from a variety of sources.
Hence, they require Reference data management.
Reference data is utilized across the front, middle, and back-office systems of an investment bank. It helps banks and financial institutions reduce exposure to counterparty credit risk. It also manages capital and liquidity. All this is achieved by leveraging an Intelligent Data Platform.
What are the advantages of a reference data platform?
• Manage and deliver reliable reference data across the system and existing reference centers.
• Create a single source of the truth through onboarding the new entity identifier and cross-reference it with existing entity information and identifiers.
• Streamline hierarchy structures.
• Deliver and syndicate data to any system in any format, latency, or structure.
We at Imarticus Learning constantly update our course curriculum to enable you to build a firm foundation for sound careers in banking by contributing to resolving the challenges faced by the investment banking industry.
Reference data management is one of the top challenges faced by investment banks in 2016 and also a crucial part of our syllabus. This not only enables you to grab a coveted job but also keeps those already a part of the industry updated with the recent trends.
