Oscar Kenessey, head of derivatives, fixed income and currency trading at NNIP has suggested that sharing data between asset managers could help to overcome industry wide challenges, speaking at a panel on the first day of the Fixed Income Leaders’ summit.
“I don’t really see it [happening] but more sharing between buy-side firms would be a small but interesting step,” he said.
Carsten Just, head of fixed income trading at Nordea Asset Management, supported Kenessey’s suggestion. He noted that the more data the buyside had the better, however, much of what was available was neither standardised nor of good quality.
He said, “The more data and history you have the better. Once data is lined up you can use it as a window to look into an opaque market. But the data is in variety of shapes and data cleaning remains the big issue.”
Just added that Nordea worked with data providers to support the internal asset manager’s internal efforts to improve data quality, yet he still encountered ‘a lot of noise’.
Panel moderator and head of EMEA market structure and strategy for Liquidnet, Rebecca Healey, challenged the data providers to explain how they could improve quality and be more efficient.
Anthony Belcher, head of ICE data services, said regulation such as MiFID II had fragmented the amount of data sources feeding into the buyside, and had made the landscape more complex.
He added: “We are a community; we are not in an isolated position and that is as true for the vendors as it is for other participants in the marketplace. We work closely with software providers to ensure our data can be easily integrated.”
Healey refuted Belcher’s claim that data was easily integrated, claiming the lack of integration remained one of the industry’s biggest data challenges, and Belcher noted technical knowledge was key.
“People who understand the data model upfront in the platforms they create will be better placed to integrate data quickly and it will be easier to action,” Belcher said.
©The DESK 2019
