Who's on first, What's on second Identity Standards

A great analogy Gary & the A&C sketch is still very funny despite it's age.

Strongly-agree with your point on 'Industry wide STP', this was something that wasl always my nirvana but it's taken the crisis to force the change in mind-set so budget & refocusing to start down that road. Strongly agree that LEI's can play a big-part in that STP nirvana and the potential for leveraging LEI's in other post-trade areas is huge & dare I say it, exciting.

Will leave you with this: I always envisaged that (high-level) MO/Ops/post-trade would eventually end-up as more of an exception based monitoring-role, i.e. the focus is on the trade exceptions that didn't flow. That would trigger remedial action to ensure such exceptions don't nt reoccur. In other words, Ops would be monitoring dashboards for exceptions and action accordingly. Some way-off (if ever!) but certainly more of a realistic possibility in the 'new world' we're in but we need much more in-terms of data-standards across asset-class's & further industry buy-in to achieve that in many post-trade area's too. One example, there is a lack of global data-standards  for OTC's in reporting so we need standard economics across all OTC asset-classes to facilitate STP between all players as well as overseers, thoughts welcomed on that as I see this as a major hurdle which WILL have impact on many areas's of post-trade & crucially. daily collateral mgmt & CSA funding deadlines..

Nb, Keep your blogs coming too, I always enjoy reading them

DP

Thanks Darren for your comments. I agree the end game has the ops working on exceptions. Firms often say this is the case today but its not. Its just people dont look at the big picture. This is something that is holding the industry back as the long term is getting lost in daily fire fighting

I agree totally the OTC points and this something i have been trying to highlight to try and get uniformity and dare i say action

I am encouraged by your kind words and be assured the Wright mouth is a long way off being shut

Hi Gary,

The LEI confusion is more confusion the industry didn't need, but it is important to get the principles right.  As I understand it, the supervisors were unhappy with the single issuance point for all LEIs on the planet.  They want multiple issuers but traceable registration to single entities.

The adoption of LEI is complicated by the fact that it isn't a single identifier that will replace all the other standards in the current universe of identifiers.  It will in fact be an additional identifier that will have to be maintained in parallel with all legacy identifiers within almost all current systems and data bases.  As a result, the commercial case for imposing it rather than rationalising the existing sets of indentifiers is not terribly clear.  Big software challenge building the reconciliation and transformation processes.

Yes Kathleen. We are not starting from a blank sheet of paper otherwise it would be so easy. Some form of mapping between existing and new looks probable These maps could be in use for decades until they can be made redundent 

Gentlemen - words like "nirvana" and its equivalent "boiling the ocean" are remnants left over from the can't do crowd. We have regulatory compulsion (or will have if the G20 stays the course) for identifying uniquely, unambiguouusly and universally every financial market participant  (the LEI) and the products they own,trade and process (the UPI). 2-3 million of these, 80 million of those - not very big or troublesome at all! What is troublesome is the thought that it will be just another number - we cannot let that happen. For example we have alreday organized a consortium to tackle the STP problem and to make sure that the transition from multiple and proprietary business entity identifiers is short lived. For example the same federated servers that support the distributed LEI utility in our proposal to the FSB and the CFTC will support mapping software to resove proprietary codes into LEI's and LEI's into proprietary codes - all in the network. See our proposal by clicking on www.ssrn.com/abstract=2016874

Hi Alan, thanks for this and i agree with what you say. My aim is to create interest and ideas how LEI can be introduced to gain business benefits. STP on a industry wide scale is miles from here today but i see LEI as an important componant to make it happen

To this end i am doing a LEI CPD event on Monday for the CISI hosted by SWIFT

I dug out an old presentation i did on LEI in 2004 and you know what ? It is still relevant today