Mike is a professional facilitator and has been a financial information industry advocate for over 25 years. He is currently the Managing Director for the Enterprise Data Management Council – a business forum for financial institutions, data originators and vendors on the strategy and tactics of managing data as an enterprise-wide asset. Mike is an active participant in industry initiatives, provides consultation to global market authorities on the data implications of financial regulatory reform and is recognized as an expert in reference data strategy, governance, data quality and standards. He is currently a member of the Office of Financial Research’s (OFR) Financial Research Advisory Committee, Chair of the FRAC Data and Technology Subcommittee, member of the Financial Stability Board’s LEI Private Sector Participatory Group; member of the LEI Steering Committee within GFMA, member of the CFTC’s Data Standardization Subcommittee; on the Board of Advisors for the Data Transparency Coalition, and member of both ISO TC68/SC4 and ANSI/X9D. Mike is involved with many organizations, provides strategic advice to members and is a frequent speaker on a range of issues associated with data management. Mike has been the Managing Director of the EDM Council since February 2006.
The EDM Council was created by the globally important financial institutions to address data content challenges. They are the originators and stewards of the FIBO open standard. Michael Atkin is a member of the CFTC’s Technical Advisory Committee and the Chair of the US Treasury’s Financial Research Advisory Committee/Data & Technology Subcommittee.
The credit crisis of 2008 illustrated the data problems associated with unraveling the complex and globally interconnected world of the financial industry. We didn’t know precisely how some of the more esoteric financial instruments worked. We couldn’t link derivatives to their underlying assets. We had a difficult time unraveling ownership and control relationships of legal entities. We didn’t fully understand who was obligated to whom and who would be left holding the obligation when financial processes were unraveling. It was a devastating problem then and it is not much better now.
Conventional approaches aren’t working. There is only one real solution – data harmonization across federated systems, aligned to contractual meaning and expressed in RDF/OWL. In this presentation, we will put the data challenges associated with linked risk analysis into context and explain the pathway moving forward using the Financial Industry Business Ontology (FIBO).