Representatives from the ISO, Goldman Sachs, Google and Swift are among the members of a new technology advisory sub-committee on data standardisation set up by the CFTC.
The CFTC (Commodity Futures Trading Commission) decided to set up the sub-committee earlier this year to help develop standards for describing, communicating and storing data on complex financial products.
Explaining the plan in May, CFTC commissioner Scott O'Malia, said: "The data and reporting mandates of the Dodd-Frank Act place the CFTC in the centre of the complex intersection of data, finance and the law. There is a need and desire to go beyond legal entity identifiers and lay the foundation for universal data terms to describe transactions in an electronic format that are identifiable as financial instruments and recognizable as binding legal documents."
Having received 52 nominations, the CFTC has now appointed members from the EDM Council, Citi, Barclays Capital, ICE, Google, ISDA, Finra, the DTCC, Goldman Sachs, Bloomberg, Thomson Reuters, NFA, ISO, Swift, CME Group, MarkitServ, Blackrock, docGenix, and the FIA. Federal agency observers from the SEC, Treasury/Office of Financial Research and Ferc have also been appointed.
Chaired by CFTC chief economist Andrei Kirilenko it will hold three sessions over the course of this year, with four working groups: product and entity identification, semantic representation of financial instruments, machine-readable legal documents, and storage and retrieval of financial data.
The sub-committee will then present a report with its recommendations to the Technology Advisory Committee, which will then consider it and make recommendations to the CFTC.