As part of the expansion, the new Board elected John Bottega, Chief Data Officer, Citi Markets & Banking as the Chairman of the Board of Directors. Bottega succeeds Mike Meriton, CEO, GoldenSource and founding member of the EDM Council as the new Chairman. Meriton remains as an EDM Council Director.

In addition, the new Board includes senior representatives from: Babson Capital Management LLC, Bank of New York Mellon Corporation, Bank of Scotland, Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank AG, HSBC Group, JPMorgan Worldwide Securities Services, M&G Investments, Merrill Lynch & Co., Nordea Bank AB, Royal Bank of Canada, UBS AG and a tier 1 global bank. The new financial institutional Directors join BearingPoint, Cicada, GoldenSource, IBM and SunGard as members of the Board. Other appointments may be forthcoming in the near future.

The concept of EDM as an essential requirement for effective and efficient business operations is now well established. The EDM Council has expanded its Board of Directors as a mechanism to coordinate broad industry viewpoints on how to effectively move the concept of EDM into the reality of EDM. The new Board will help provide leadership and perspective to prioritize the agenda for the Council to support this movement and will help aggregate industry views on the practical requirements related to improving data quality as well as how it is most efficiently communicated among all supply chain participants.

"The addition of these financial institutions to the Board of Directors was a planned and logical extension of the Council's strategy. The goal of EDM is to improve the levels of trust and confidence financial institutions have in their data as a core factor of input into business operations," said Michael Atkin, Managing Director, EDM Council. "Therefore it makes complete sense that we would take steps to ensure that they not only join the discussion, but take control of how the agenda is prioritized and ad articulated."

John Bottega, Chairman, EDM Council said, "The importance of enterprise-wide data management is both clear and a relatively new phenomena within the financial industry. Those of us involved in this arena need a place to meet, share experiences and address some of the outstanding issues. The EDM Council, with its newly expanded Board will enable us to openly address the practical implementation realities of what firms are going through as we implement our data management strategies."

"It has always been the goal of this Council to ensure its activities were driven by the needs of financial institutions," said outgoing Chair, Michael Meriton. "The commitment by these financial services executives to serve as members of the expanded Council Board clearly demonstrates the evolution and importance that EDM has gained as a business priority for the industry."