The challenges of data ownership and the commercial provision of data were tackled head on, at the Fixed Income Leaders Summit in Barcelona, with a panel of traders, dealers and commercial data providers agreeing progress should be made, although a clear resolution was not found.
“It’s not as black and white, as there is one clear owner,” said Cathy Gibson, global head of trading at Ninety One. “I agree that [data providers] add value, but I look at my trade data and I consider that to be mine. I initiated the trade, I closed the tray, and I will consider it to be mine. I don’t think I’m wrong. Then there are funds, particularly in the US, actually putting in clauses say all data to do with any transaction on the back of this fund is the sole proprietary of the actual fund itself.
Consequently, there you have three people claiming to potentially own the same data set [the asset manager, the dealer and the venue], so it is not straightforward.” Amanda Hindlian, president of fixed income & data services at ICE said, “This is a complicated question that will continue to persist. The most important thing is, are you extracting value from your data? Many of you will say ‘no’. It is a bit like Don Quixote, at first you’re chasing windmills, and at what point does some of the data become truly useful to you? That is in some elements a learning exercise.”
“There’s a massive cost on the industry that arises from the complexity of data licencing agreements,” says Daniel Mayston, head of electronic trading and market structure at BlackRock. “We’ve had the political agreements to get a consolidated tape [in Europe], the UK is also forging ahead so lessons need to be learned that we need simpler licencing arrangements.
We have to move away from this use-case-by-use-case licencing, which is so complicated that you need to whole legal departments to just stay on top of the cases you have, and auditing requirements etc.” This is affecting the democratisation of data, he observed, which ultimately affects the ability to perform in terms of trading and potentially investment. “Ultimately, data does need to be something that gets put into the hands of people,” he said. “The onerous complexity is just an unnecessary obstacle.”
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