State Street Begins Data-Mapping Activity

State Street Global Advisors has begun implementing a transaction data mapping program that ties together software provided by Cambridge Semantics, the FIBO (Financial Industry Business Ontology) standard developed by the EDM Council, and additional data fed by Dun & Bradstreet for comparison purposes, according to David Saul, senior vice president and chief scientist at State Street.

The implementation began by loading the FIBO standard into Cambridge Semantics' Anzo semantic middleware software, Saul explains. The next step is "dragging and dropping data" from SunGard's Front Arena position and risk management system into the Anzo software, which in turn uses FIBO to map it, he adds. Setting up the functionality in the software for this process took only a few hours.

The FIBO model can then show the relationship between securities and transactions, particularly with interest rate swaps and other derivatives, says Saul. "We had some questions, where we had a piece of our data and couldn't find it immediately in FIBO," he says. "You do need some education on FIBO. Most of it is intuitive. Once we got over that first hurdle, we found that 100% of our data elements are mapped in FIBO." Wells Fargo consulted on FIBO implementation in the effort, he adds.

The third step in the mapping process, once data was entered into the FIBO semantics, was creating graphical representations of entities and collateral in the transactions from the data, says Saul. "That fell out naturally," he says.

The fourth and final step, which is still in a preliminary stage, is turning the maps created into dashboards that can be monitored regularly, adds Saul. "We must ask what we monitor on a daily basis," he says. "Obviously, collateral is one thing—if someone has too heavy a concentration in one company or geographical area, we will create dashboards for them. We will also sit down with our risk professionals to set up similar monitoring capability."