Leslie will take up the new role on 1 January 2020, as well as a position on the SIX executive board, replacing the outgoing Robert Jeanbart, who is to retire in December this year.

Having joined Refinitiv in 1994 when the firm was part of Thomson Reuters, Leslie has held a series of management positions with the data vendor and was most recently a managing director for enterprise, with responsibility for the data business in the areas of regulation, pricing and reference data.

“I am very pleased to welcome Marion Leslie to SIX,” commented Jos Dijsselhof, chief executive officer of SIX. “I am proud to have been able to attract such an experienced professional and internationally active leader for SIX. Marion knows the financial information business very well and with her at the helm we will drive our financial data business to the next level.”

Robert Jeanbard is due to step down as the current head of Financial Information and member of the executive board later this year, having held both positions since May 2014. Jeanbart led the restructuring of the SIX Financial information unit, building out its regulatory data and services, reference data and corporate actions activities in the process.

“On behalf of the Board of Directors and the Executive Board of SIX, I would like to thank Robert Jeanbart for his enormous and tireless dedication to SIX, his leadership in driving a very successful transformation of Financial Information,” concluded Jos Dijsselhof.

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The Office of Financial Research (OFR) has unveiled plans to develop a common language for financial instruments in the US to support reference data.

In a recently released report, OFR described current reference data as being complex, incomplete and incompatible, which is hindering interoperability across service providers and users.

“Aligning to standards will facilitate data interoperability between market participants, data providers, and analytics providers,” OFR said.

The report added firms spend considerable time and resources collecting, consolidating and harmonising poor quality reference data, but a common language could see a “balance of trading positions and operation risks from valuation errors.”

The plans include the adoption of an instrument reference data dictionary, conformity assessment procedures for a database and promotion of its use across the industry.

It also suggested for the common language to work, the initiative must identify and prioritise gaps in current financial instrument reference data that currently offer little to no data standardisation.

“The result will be a common language employed by all US public and private financial market participants, applying consensus standards and open source reference data, to establish a singular understanding of a financial instrument and its components,” OFR concluded. 

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The group, which is working alongside technology firms R3 and Axoni through the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Assocation (SIFMA), has recently complete a proof of concept excersise that was coordinated by Credit Suisse to build a distributed ledger prototype that would enhance risk management, cost and efficiency for reference data.

The concept was developed using Axoni’s proprietary distributed ledger software to simulate collaborative management of reference data. Participants in the test were able to interact with the reference data after corporate bond issuance. Any proposed changes to the data required validation by the underwriter to give the ledger a single, immutable record of all data related to the bond.

The firms claim that up to 70% of the data used in financial transactions is reference data, underlining the importance of ensuring such datasets are accurate.

Dean Rutter, CEO of R3, said: “Quality of data has become a crucial issue for financial institutions in today’s markets. Unfortunately, their middle and back offices rely on legacy systems and processes – often manual – to manage and repair unclear, inaccurate reference data. Distributed ledger technology – which allows financial institutions to push these functions to a cloud environment – removes the need to reconcile multiple copies of data, providing a sophisticated and agile solution to the headaches currently caused by these legacy systems and processes.”

While the initial prototype suggests blockchain technology could have applications in reference data, it remains in its early stages, though participants in the proof of concept hope it will encourage further review of how it can be applied to improve efficiencies in data and other financial services applications.

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The SmartStream Reference Data Utility (RDU) has been backed by Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley and provides services for instrument reference data normalisation, validation, cross-referencing and cleansing across multiple asset classes.

SmartStream has reached agreements to use data provided by Euromoney TRADEDATA, Exchange Data International, Interactive Data Corp, S&P Capital IQ, S&P Dow Jones Indices, SIX Financial and Thomson Reuters. It is also in discussions with Markit to develop a partnership to integrate its credit default swap reference data into the RDU.

These agreements will enable more efficient on-boarding of data and jointly managed support arrangements, giving clients a higher service level, SmartStream said.

SmartStream’s CEO, Philippe Chambadal, said that firms are looking to spend more money with their data vendors to meet regulatory obligations, but also to add value to their business, and said the RDU will make it easier for clients to access the information they need.

“The RDU’s mission is to lower the cost of processing reference data. Delivering on that mission creates opportunities for data vendors as we open up space for additional spend and as we lower data integration costs – one of the biggest barriers to purchasing more vendor data.”

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