CounterpartyLink has announced a three-year agreement to provide legal entity data to Desjardins Group, the largest cooperative financial group in Canada.
The data will be initially used by the organisation to ensure that a single and unique legal entity identifier is assigned across all functional departments of the organisation. This data is then being integrated into an enterprise-wide central data management system that is in the process of being rolled out. Once in the production phase, which is envisioned to gradually go live in 2008 and early 2009, CounterpartyLink’s data will be available to the front, middle and back offices across their multiple business lines active on financial markets.
CounterpartyLink currently provides 94 fields of validated data for each entity, covering name and address details, corporate hierarchy, registration and regulator details and a variety of other standard identifiers, including SWIFT BIC codes, and also CounterpartyLink’s own proprietary identifier.
Every field in a CounterpartyLink data record is linked back to an electronically stored original public filing or web page, providing a complete audit trail back to the source for each value displayed. CounterpartyLink’s data is updated on a daily basis for changes that result from corporate actions and other notifications.
“We have an immediate requirement to de-duplicate, validate and assign a single internal identifier to every legal entity from around the world that we hold across a number of internal databases. We chose CounterpartyLink not only because they have the coverage and data fields required, but also because their data collection and validation standards are designed to meet stringent international regulatory requirements, which is of course a very important focus for us,” says Pierre Beaudoin, senior advisor, Market and Insurance Risk Management.
“We are delighted to have been selected by Desjardins, now our first client in Canada, to help not only in meeting their immediate data management requirements, but importantly in providing the basis of a continuously validated entity database. This will benefit their ongoing proactive approach in maintaining legal entity data for compliance and business purposes. We look forward to continuing to help them as part of their data management strategy for some time to come,” adds James Redfern, head of alliances and partnerships, CounterpartyLink.