Awards for Excellence 2014: Best wholesale banking technology innovation

It seemed an impossible task – the new world order of global regulators demanded information and data in real time from different formats, with different requirements in different regions and from different platforms. “As an industry we were used to trading in real time, but we were not used to collecting data about settlements and confirmations and portfolios on a real time basis as the processes just did not allow for assimilation of large data sets to be pooled,” says Sumeet Chabria, CIO for global banking and markets at HSBC. “Now all of a sudden the regulators were requiring additional transparency to ensure data was clean and in a single format that could be called upon near real time. It threw up a host of problems that all needed solving at once.”

HSBC was faced with a formidable challenge when it came to standardising its data. The bank is classed as a swap dealer, meaning that nearly all of its derivative trading has to be reported. Like its peers, it has many different trading systems producing data in multiple formats and it never before had to get all of this data into a standardised format.