Achieving consensus

There has been an initiative to adopt a standardised list of reference entities for credit derivatives trading, but attempts to standardise counterparty reference data have been much slower getting off the ground. However, regulatory changes could force banks to rethink their approach. By Clive Davidson

Keeping consistent, accurate and up-to-date data on their derivatives counterparties has proven remarkably difficult for financial institutions. Until recently, banks have tackled this problem in their own way, creating internal databases of business entity information that they refer to in trading, settlement and other contexts. However, a number of factors are converging to force institutions to