Ref-Data.com is a radical new data service launched by UK software developer 1View Solutions, with which to validate, enrich and maintain reference and market data. Significantly for banks at this time, Ref-Data.com can save significant sums of money when appending LEI to counterparty databases.

Developed by Nigel Pickering, a former Barclays Capital, London Stock Exchange, SG Warburg and Chase Manhattan executive, Ref-Data.com contains data from many vendors, exchanges and other authoritative sources. The application has automated the process of combining a bank's data with its preferred sources, providing the targeted outputs they need.

All users have to do is upload an extract of their internal data to Ref-Data.com's secure and confidential website and the service does the rest. Ref-Data.com will not only highlight any necessary updates (subject to vendor license) but can automatically append LEI numbering to a user's entity data making it an easy step to incorporate the new data element in local or reporting systems. This means that several local databases can become fully operational each week.

By using Ref-Data.com, banks will achieve significant reductions in maintenance costs, improve their data quality and avoid the complexity of large-scale data models.

The need for an LEI system to enable investing entities to track their exposures is clear. Although not the root cause of the financial crisis, the enormous difficulties experienced by financial institutions in determining their consolidated entity exposures within very complex hierarchies when significant market failures occurred (such as Lehman) left a deep impression on legislators, institutions, trading entities and regulators. Yet the cost implications for establishing and implementing the LEI have been a cause for concern.

Nigel Pickering, founder, 1View Solutions: "The banks wish to do more than just back the call for a method of avoiding another systemic failure, yet with all the existing pressures on the data management function being applied by regulation, how can data managers achieve entity consistency without buckling under the time, strain, or cost of a vast data warehousing project? Ref-Data.com's federated solution avoids the prohibitive constraints and complexities of the centralised database models that large organisations have been struggling with for many years."