Nothing beats knowledge and experience combined with control methods when it comes to meeting data quality requirements across the trading enterprise, says Joe Kavanagh, CFA, head of performance measurement and risk analysis, KBI Global Investors, Dublin, Ireland.
FTF News interviewed Kavanagh during FTF’s Performance Measurement Americas conference, PMA 19, held last month in New York City. He was one of the presenters for the 2020 GIPS Standards Workshop at the conference and served as a panelist for the “Optimizing Quality Control for Data” and the “Navigating the Attribution Maze” sessions at the two-day event.
“Certainly, my firm relies upon the communication of data into our accounting system at 7:30 am every morning,” Kavanagh says. “We have quite a number of exception reports built into that process to flag to us issues with data quality. Now, that said, we cannot necessarily rely wholly on that process. We have a team that is charged with the governance of that process every morning.”
In addition, Kavanagh annually organizes “a training session with those people with really only one agenda item available — and that is to look at data from a performance measurement perspective; to get an understanding of what good data is and what bad data is,” he says. “I want these people to understand that, ‘Hey, Joe and his team would not be happy with that.’ ”
Ultimately, if those charged with governance can identify the bad data leaking out of the firm’s systems “despite our exception reporting and the quality checks we apply to the data,” and then apply their knowledge and experience, “that is the extra sweet spot that I expect,” Kavanagh says.
Click the screen above to see the full video interview.
CREDITS:
Video Production: Janene Knox and William J. Poznanski, Jr.
Interview conducted by Eugene Grygo, chief content officer, FTF News
Co-Producers: Sarah Hathaway, vice president, Financial Technologies Forum (FTF) and Eugene Grygo