Counterparty reporting and entity data quality have become major concerns. Earlier this year the Senior Supervisors Group, in a progress report to the Financial Stability Board (FSB), stated that firms are failing to meet supervisory expectations with regards to counterparty reporting and the ability to accurately report risk exposure: "Five years after the financial crisis, firms' progress toward consistent, timely, and accurate reporting of top counterparty exposures fails to meet both supervisory expectations and industry self-identified best practices. The area of greatest concern remains firms' inability to consistently produce high-quality data."

GoldenSource enables firms to meet these supervisory requirements, notably that of being able to quickly and accurately aggregate counterparty exposure at the group level. Its EDM solution manages instrument, counterparty and issuer data on a single platform, using keys such as the legal entity identifier (LEI) to link each entity to its various roles, hierarchies and alternate identifiers. This allows firms to better understand the relationships between their customers and counterparties.

This unified approach to entity management facilitates data standardization and cross-referencing. The result is improved data quality, reduced redundancy of operations and data sets, and increased auditability. It also accelerates the on-boarding processes; a major competitive advantage. A solid entity master accessed via the LEI is the foundation for understanding exposure to specific entities, including improved visibility and more rigorous risk management practices.

This new capability is built upon the foundation of GoldenSource EDM's strong relationship and hierarchy management capabilities. To provide a simple, out-of-the-box solution that offers quick installation, GoldenSource EDM now includes an extensive set of rules and workflows for entity data management, which have been validated and refined in partnership with clients. These new capabilities are available as part of GoldenSource EDM Version 8.5, which firms can deploy on premise or via OnDemand, GoldenSource's managed service offering. The GoldenSource entity master also leverages GoldenSource Connections, the industry benchmark for vendor feed management services, to deliver gold copy entity data.

Neill Vanlint, Global Managing Director at GoldenSource, commented: "Financial institutions now understand that maintaining identifiers like the LEI in multiple locations is costly and inefficient. With a single entity master that supports all identifiers and hierarchies, they can future proof their reference data backbone. They can also avoid a cycle of major surgery on customer, counterparty and issuer masters as entity-related data governance tightens. In addition, having a single entity view that links to products paves the way for valuable upselling opportunities. Forward-thinking firms are taking advantage of these regulatory drivers to deliver benefits beyond compliance, including lower costs and improved data quality."