Financial Services Directives – Requirements for Data Technologies

The focus in this paper is on EU directives for the financial sector and what their requirements are in terms of information management capabilities. However, it is not limited either to a European context or to financial companies. For example, the Market Abuse Directive affects all listed companies and not just financial institutions. As for non-EU regulations we will discuss Dodd-Frank, FATCA and GATCA, and the trend towards Legal Entity Identifiers worldwide, primarily to demonstrate that the sort of information management requirements needed to meet EU regulations are simply exemplars of a worldwide trend.

Specifically, this paper begins with a brief discussion on the global position with regard to compliance and this is followed by an introduction to the EU regulatory framework and how the EU decides and implements relevant directives. It highlights current and planned EU Financial Services Directives that require extended data demands from information technology (IT) services to meet compliance requirements. Of course, EU directives are constantly being updated and planned, proposed and implemented in response to political pressures and events. While this paper is not an exhaustive review of each and every directive, it will provide IT practitioners with an awareness of the impact of scale and categories of data requirements.

We then continue with a discussion of the market drivers and demands that are leading to the directives to be discussed, along with a general consideration of the types of information management technologies that will need to be applied to achieve compliance. Next there is a detailed section in which we examine each of the pertinent regulations, in priority order, along with their information management requirements.