The EDM Council held its second meeting in London on October 6, 2005. The meeting was hosted by CSFB, one of the founding members, at its offices in Canary Wharf.
New member Chris Renardson, head of Global Operations Strategy at ABN-AMRO commented: “The bank is implementing organizational structures and processes to improve the quality and timeliness of enterprise information. EDM plays a key role in this strategy and we appreciate that it will be a major factor in the future of this market place.”
The EDM Council, a forum for senior executives, was launched in New York on June 16, 2005. Active membership of the EDM Council now stands at 51 Members. There are 39 Members representing 25 Financial Institutions including broker/dealers, asset managers and securities firms and 12 Members from the five founding sponsors: Cicada, BearingPoint, GoldenSource, IBM and SunGard. For the second Council meeting, a sample representation of new member firms included: ABN AMRO, Barclays Capital, HSBC, M&G, and Nomura. The Council collectively endorses EDM as an important strategic vision, focused on enterprise wide integration of data management operations and reference and transaction data consolidation. The importance of accurate Customer and Counterparty data and the challenges to standardize data management processes across a firm were some of the key areas discussed at the London meeting.
A survey, conducted at the London meeting, found that 90% of Members consider EDM implementation and organizational best practices among the top three priorities for their organizations in 2006. This result is a barometer of prevalent thinking on EDM from some of the worlds’ largest financial services institutions. It validates the scope and focus of the two current working groups, due to present their initial research at the next Council meeting. The purpose of these working groups is to support the success of EDM implementations and mitigate the risks by providing best practice guidelines and thought leadership to EDM practitioners.