Another good event from PRMIA at the Harmonie Club here in NYC last week, entitled Risk Data Agregation and Risk Reporting – Progress and Challenges for Risk Management. Abraham Thomas of Citi and PRMIA introduced the evening, setting the scene by refering to the BCBS document Principles for effective risk data aggregation and risk reporting, with its 14 principles to be implemented by January 2016 for G-SIBs (Globally Systemically Important Banks) and December 2016 for D-SIBS (Domestically Systemically Important Banks).

The event was sponsored by SAP and they were represented by Dr Michael Adam on the panel, who gave a presentation around risk data management and the problems have having data siloed across many different systems. Maybe unsurprisingly Michael’s presentation had a distinct “in-memory” focus to it, with Michael emphasizing the data analysis speed that is now possible using technologies such as SAP’s in-memory database offering “Hana“.

Following the presentation, the panel discussion started with a debate involving Dilip Krishna of Deloitte and Stephanie Losi of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. They discussed whether the BCBS document and compliance with it should become a project in itself or part of existing initiatives to comply with data intensive regulations such as CCAR and CVA etc. Stephanie is on the board of the BCBS committee for risk data aggregation and she said that the document should be a guide and not a check list. There seemed to be general agreement on the panel that data architectures should be put together not with a view to compliance with one specific regulation but more as a framework to deal with all regulation to come, a more generalized approach.

Dilip said that whilst technology and data integration are issues, people are the biggest issue in getting a solid data architecture in place. There was an audience question about how different departments need different views of risk and how were these to be reconciled/facilitated. Stephanie said that data security and control of who can see what is an issue, and Dilip agreed and added that enterprise risk views need to be seen by many which was a security issue to be resolved.

Don Wesnofske of PRMIA and Dell said that data quality was another key issue in risk. Dilip agreed and added that the front office need to be involved in this (data management projects are not just for the back office in insolation) and that data quality was one of a number of needs that compete for resources/budget at many banks at the moment. Coming back to his people theme, Dilip also said that data quality also needed intuition to be carried out successfully.

An audience question from Dan Rodriguez (of PRMIA and Credit Suisse) asked whether regulation was granting an advantage to “Too Big To Fail” organisations in that only they have the resources to be able to cope with the ever-increasing demands of the regulators, to the detriment of the smaller financial insitutions. The panel did not completely agree with Dan’s premise, arguing that smaller organizations were more agile and did not have the legacy and complexity of the larger institutions, so there was probably a sweet spot between large and small from a regulatory compliance perspective (I guess it was interesting that the panel did not deny that regulation was at least affecting the size of financial institutions in some way…)

Again focussing on where resources should be deployed, the panel debated trade-offs such as those between accuracy and consistency. The Legal Entity Identifier (LEI) initiative was thought of as a great start in establishing standards for data aggregation, and the panel encouraged regulators to look at doing more. One audience question was around the different and inconsistent treatment of gross notional and trade accounts. Dilip said that yes this was an issue, but came back to Stephanie’s point that what is needed is a single risk data platform that is flexible enough to be used across multiple business and compliance projects.  Don said that he suggests four “views” on risk:

• Risk Taking
• Risk Management
• Risk Measurement
• Risk Regulation

Stephanie added that organisations should focus on the measures that are most appropriate to your business activity.

The next audience question asked whether the panel thought that the projects driven by regulation had a negative return. Dilip said that his experience was yes, they do have negative returns but this was simply a cost of being in business. Unsurprisingly maybe, Stephanie took a different view advocating the benefits side coming out of some of the regulatory projects that drove improvements in data management.

The final audience question was whether the panel through the it was possible to reconcile all of the regulatory initiatives like Dodd-Frank, Basel III, EMIR etc with operational risk. Don took a data angle to this question, taking about the benefits of big data technologies applied across all relevant data sets, and that any data was now potentially valuable and could be retained. Dilip thought that the costs of data retention were continually going down as data volumes go up, but that there were costs in capturing the data need for operational risk and other applications. Dilip said that when compared globally across many industries, financial markets were way behind the data capabilities of many sectors, and that finance was more “Tiny Data” than “Big Data” and again he came back to the fact that people were getting in the way of better data management. Michael said that many banks and market data vendors are dealing with data in the 10’s of TeraBytes range, whereas the amount of data in the world was around 8-900 PetaBytes (I thought we were already just over into ZetaBytes but what are a few hundred PetaBytes between friends…).

Abraham closed off the evening, firstly by asking the audience if they thought the 2016 deadline would be achieved by their organisation. Only 3 people out of around 50+ said yes. Not sure if this was simply people’s reticence to put their hand up, but when Abraham asked one key concern for many was that the target would change by then – my guess is that we are probably back into the territory of the banks not implementing a regulation because it is too vague, and the regulators not being too prescriptive because they want feedback too. So a big game of chicken results, with the banks weighing up the costs/fines of non-compliance against the costs of implementing something big that they can’t be sure will be acceptable to the regulators. Abraham then asked the panel for closing remarks: Don said that data architecture was key; Stephanie suggested getting the strategic aims in place but implementing iteratively towards these aims; Dilip said that deciding your goal first was vital; and Michael advised building a roadmap for data in risk.