OMG And Enterprise Data Management Council To Develop Data Standards for Financial Reform

Leaders of computer industry standards organization OMG and the Enterprise Data Management Council (EDM Council) have agreed to address high impact business challenges such as regulatory pressures emerging from financial reform with the development of a sustainable framework and data standards.

OMG, the Object Management Group, and EDM Council, a not-for-profit business forum created by the financial industry to address the issues and challenges associated with managing data content as a business and operational priority, will help organizations transform their data into 'actionable Intelligence' to support systemic risk assessment and analytics while addressing the interoperability issues in the global financial system by working together to develop a common language and symbology, they said in a release.

OMG and EDM Council are bringing together EDM's domain expertise and OMG's standardization expertise to complete, maintain and build a semantic repository standard that will dramatically increase efficiency in financial services firms serving capital markets, they said. The upcoming joint standards that OMG and EDM are developing will be jointly developed, managed and maintained.

"EDM Council's semantic repository and OMG's modeling and interoperability standards (coupled with their partnerships with other standards organizations) will help Citigroup and other financial services organizations better address the business and operational challenges emerging from the financial reform regulations such as the Dodd-Frank Act," said Eric Chacon, global head of data standards at Citi Chief Data Office and Dr. Harsh W. Sharma of Citi Chief Data Office, OMG Finance Task Force Co-Chair.

Assessment and analysis of systemic risk not only requires legal entity and financial instrument identifiers but also a deeper understanding of their complex hierarchies and traceability across front-middle-back office systems, OMG and EDM Council said. "Such capability can be better achieved by modeling the business events and concepts, their contextual nuances and inter-relationships supported by standard interchange formats across heterogeneous IT systems," they added. "OMG and the EDM Council have been working together quite successfully for some time, so this is a natural expansion of our efforts," said Richard Mark Soley, Ph.D., chairman and CEO, OMG. "The highly complementary combination of deep knowledge of the financial services domain by EDM Council and decades of experience in standards development, maintenance and the creation of market ecosystems on the part of OMG will lead to a widely accepted standard terminology and agreed upon semantics library that will smooth trade flows and other financial transactions to enable low-cost straight-through processing." Financial institutions across the industry agree that it is critical to establish a precise common language describing the contractual structure of financial instruments, says Michael Atkin, managing director of the EDM Council. "Semantic precision is now recognized as the prerequisite for automating business processes and essential to ensure confidence in analytical objectives of both financial institutions and regulators," he adds.

"Our relationship with OMG will help elevate the Semantics Repository as a formal standard and establish the sustainable governance required to ensure its continuous maintenance, a crucial requirement to drive adoption withi Melanie Rodier has worked as a print and broadcast journalist for over 10 years, covering business and finance, general news, and film trade news. Prior to joining Wall Street & Technology in April 2007, Melanie lived in Paris, where she worked for the International Herald ... View Full Bio