Investment banks must stop thinking aboutstoragein terms of volume and
capacity but instead put retrieval at the top of their policies to
help meet theMarkets in Financial Instruments Directive
(MiFID), research firm Gartner has
advised.
Peter Redshaw, an analyst at Gartner, said many businesses that
will come under the MiFID umbrella do not have storage policies in
place to help them deal with compliance.
"Because people do not have storage policies to deal with
compliance they create silos of data and a lot of this is outside
the IT department's control," said Redshaw.
He said spreadsheets are still widely used within the financial
services industry. Individuals store data on the desktop that may
one day be needed to prove a company complied with MiFID's Best
Execution regulation, which requires that investment companies
offer the best deal available at the time and are able to prove
it.
"People look at storage and think about volume and capacity and
less about retrieval," added Redshaw.
He said this must change and data about the market, references,
customers and processes must be retrievable for years after a
trade. "Storage is now more than just an IT issue."
Financial services firms should put policies into in place to
ensure this happens.
Redshaw presented his MiFID: have you missed the boat?
presentation today at Gartner's Financial Services Technology
Summit.