Interactive Data Corporation, a leading provider of global pricing and reference data, today announced a new service designed to support cross-asset data management and reporting requirements under the European Union's Solvency II Directive.
Interactive Data's Solvency II Service draws on the firm's extensive, high-quality and in-depth pricing and reference data, including independent and industry-leading evaluated pricing for thinly traded instruments.
The new service will help to streamline data management, and enhance transparency, by providing insurers and the asset managers that work on their behalf with more granular information on their investments and on the entities issuing the assets.
Nicolas Michellod, senior analyst at Celent, said: "Addressing Solvency II remains one of the most important preoccupations of European insurers. They need to not only evaluate how they can leverage existing IT infrastructures, but also to find the right balance between their internal IT applications and specific technology offerings from expert providers to meet qualitative and quantitative reporting requirements. This is particularly true when examining the data management requirements that are extremely complex due to the sheer quantity and quality of data that is required to identify, manage and monitor the various risk categories."
The breadth of data available within Interactive Data's Solvency II Service can enable firms to efficiently calculate the market and default risk measurements demanded under the Solvency II Pillar 1 Minimum Capital Requirements (MCR) and Solvency Capital Requirements (SCR). It also provides the additional asset data required for the Quantitative Reporting Templates (QRTs) under Pillar 3.
The Service includes the Complementary Identification Code (CIC), an asset level classification schema explicitly required for Solvency II. This is in addition to NACE, SIC and NAICS classifications to provide consistency across global entities and asset classes, and which are mapped to over four million individual assets.
Brendan Beith, managing director Pricing and Reference Data - EMEA at Interactive Data, commented: "Data volumes and complexity will increase due to changes in investment profiles triggered by Solvency II asset risk weightings. Aggregating that detailed asset information from multiple sources could prove to be a difficult and time consuming task. We have taken a broad approach to the data challenge that this new regulation presents, leveraging our experience and expertise to deliver an in-depth service that will support compliance with Solvency II."