Wiki-data development with BT/Osmosoft

It's been a while since my last post but we have been busy working on wiki-data. Some of you will know that we have been in discussions with the open source software group at British Telecom. It's a subsidiary called Osmosoft comprised of some frighteningly clever technologists with impressive credentials and serious talent.

A group of us from Avox including senior management from our Wrexham office, our sales team including Brett Hodge who came over from Australia and myself spent a day with Osmosoft last week. They affectionately refer to these as "HackDays".

Within the space of 10 hours, this team, led by Jeremy Ruston, the Osmosoft founder, put together a brand new (I mean built from scratch) version of wiki-data with some great interactive functionality. We provided the guys with a very large dataset which they used as a base. By the end of the day, we had a platform where every AVID had its own URI (uniform resource identifier) so that anyone can link to or from it, addresses of companies are now linked to Google Maps so you can visualize where firms are based (we quickly found one in Iraq!), anyone can begin a comment string on an entity and yes, we even had an online edit function (we are going to need to figure out how to govern that one before releasing it!).

If you are interested, your best bet is to have a look at Michael Mahemoff's blog where you will find detailed descriptions of the process and outcome as well as a video of me and Paul Downey of Osmosoft running you through the platform before we ran to the pub for pints. Just click on the link (embedded in the heading) at the top of this post.

Or if you prefer: http://softwareas.com/wikidata-hackathon-wikidata-a-wiki-of-companies-data.

I'll keep you posted on what will be rolling out and when. We are extremely excited.

Ken

KYC - Global Regulatory Conflict

On June 4, GoldTier, a KYC software company hosted a speaker panel to discuss the impact of a changing global political and economic environment on the Know Your Customer (KYC) function at financial institutions. One of the discussion points exposed a great deal of frustration amongst the participants which included representatives from North American and European financial institutions.

As a KYC professional at a global financial institution, it is incumbent upon you to ensure that the head office of your firm is aware of their global exposure to any and all customers. This requires transmission of what some consider to be "sensitive" data across international borders. Countries including Singapore, Switzerland and Korea are asserted to have in place data privacy regulations that prevent such data from being sent across their borders. By definition, this would make it legally impossible for firms located outside of those countries to do business there.

This is clearly not the business reality. The problem as I see it is that compliance officers are paid to be ultra conservative and risk averse. This results in overly conservative interpretations of international regulations governing, amongst other things, data protection. This puts them and their firms in an awkward position of having to rely on the opinion of their locally based compliance function to make judgements without having the ability to regularly audit the process and data from a foreign head office. So ironically the risk averse compliance function is introducing a significant risk to their firm by not sending what is typically generic company information between geographies.

We have international clients who have realized this and have engaged with regulators in countries like Singapore to get clarity. Indeed Avox has been involved in some of these discussions directly. In most cases, there is actually no restriction on sending company information outside of these countries. How on earth would firms in these countries do business internationally if this was the case?

It's time for the business to work closely with compliance and have frank discussions with any regulatory body they believe is hampering transparency. Any country that truly prohibits communication of important decision support information outside of their borders needs to be prepared to suffer a drastic reduction in international trade. I think you will find that the reality is most regulators will not stand in the way of legitimate commerce.

Ken

Avox partners with CUSIP/S&P

Like a said a few weeks ago, I anticipate a flurry of activity in the reference data space. OK, I had some inside information upon which to make this assertion but the reality is - it's happening.

We are really excited about this arrangement with CUSIP. Some skeptics out there are suggesting that this is not a good partnership because of some negative press CUSIP is getting, particularly in Europe. I look at it the other way around. By partnering with Avox, CUSIP is embracing a more open approach to entity reference data. The content managed by Avox within this partnership will be consistent with that of all Avox clients which currently include the likes of Barclays, Citigroup, Nomura and Standard Bank of South Africa. It will also be consistent with entity data held by our partners including firms such as SWIFT, Interactive Data and Markit. Applying the CABRE will be quick and efficient for these companies as well as for existing CUSIP customers and partners. In essence, this partnership proves that collaboration is growing and succeeding in the reference data world.

Will the CABRE become the industry standard entity identifier? Well, frankly, that's up to the market. What do you think? If you have an opinion, we'd like to hear it and get some public discussion going on.

Ken

Out with the old, in with the new.

I've been tracking Jeff Jarvis, author of "What Would Google Do?" and of the www.buzzmachine.com blog. He posted an article recently about the demise of newspapers in the form of a theoretical testimonial to Senator John Kerry's hearings. What's that got to do with data?

I find interesting parallels between the news business and our industry. Both have historically relied on IP and tight control over it. The Internet destroys control. But on the plus side, it proliferates knowledge. And on the down side, it proliferates much useless noise.

The question is, can large, blue chip businesses that rely heavily on conventional license revenue streams adapt quickly enough to this new regime of transparency to survive and prosper? A number of news organizations have found this a major challenge.

It's an exciting time to test these ideas as firms in the financial services space are forced to seriously question everything they do and how they do it. Might there be a more efficient way to improve data quality. I suppose you know my opinion on that already...

Ken