EDM Council Boston Members Brief Recap

Yesterday, a few Citisofters attended EDM Council's Boston Members Brief hosted at State Street's offices and featuring presentations from State Street, Dun & Bradstreet, and Wells Fargo, among others. The meeting kicked off with an update on EDM Council discussing successes of the past year including big gains in membership, wide acceptance of FIBO (Financial Industry Business Ontology™), and a series of successful training program focused on the fundamentals of DCAM. It's clear that EDM Council is becoming the de facto source of best practices knowledge for all things data and we're excited to be part of the dialogue. During the half-day meeting, there were great discussions about what data management means in practice and the challenges that data professionals face in implementing projects and gaining traction with governance programs. However, two of the more buzzworthy topics were a bit more forward-looking, focusing on semantics and blockchain technology.

The presentations kicked off with a discussion of State Street's proof of concept to harmonize interest rate swap data from a variety of sources to support flexible querying. State Street's Sanjeev Kumar presented the results of their testing using their real 'in the wild' data, entity data from Dun & Bradstreet, FIBO, and the Cambridge Semantics Anzo Platform. The results? FIBO and Anzo worked together seamlessly to enrich their interest rate data. This type of enrichment has far-reaching benefits across the business, particularly when it comes to managing risk. They also demonstrated a few easily digestible data views that made it clear that semantics will be the next frontier when it comes to visualizing data throughout the enterprise.

Once everyone's interest was piqued on using FIBO to harmonize State Street's data, David Newman from Wells Fargo transitioned to how FIBO can be used in conjunction with data authentication technology to establish a standardized language that can be used for 'smart contracts.' If smart contracts have not caught your attention yet, at a very basic level, they are highly secure 'if-then' scripts which will automate transactions. This has great benefit in the financial services industry, as complex transactions can be simplified and automated based on their applied logic and distributed ledger confirmation (e.g. forget about T+2!). However, one of the limitations of smart contracts in their current form is a lack of standards, and that is where FIBO comes in. Wells Fargo is working with some of the big players in blockchain technology to work on a proof of concept "over the next few month" for coupling FIBO with the ethereum blockchain to execute complex transactions (like interest rate swaps). Takeway? The future could be here sooner than we know it.

As the EDM Council grows and data continues to be a big focus for emerging technologies, we hope to continue forward-looking discussions like these to help envision the possibilities for data. Ultimately, we aim to help our clients understand how to apply current best practices so that they can leverage their data both now and as new technologies emerge.