Identifying investors.
A good post over at Accidental Light on an idea that is dear to me and something I have discussed on and off with various colleagues and partners over the past few years: the idea that there is a substantial opportunity in creating a de facto market standard for reference data for (institutional) counterparties in financial markets. Some would maintain that some fragments of this exist today. While there are a myriad of partial solutions and every financial institution maintains its own proprietary data - aside from the enormous duplication and lack of scale this engenders - it causes havoc and the need for complicated work-arounds for any collaborative and multi-party transaction management.
This idea is not new, and I am not unique in any sense of the word in having identified it (although I think you will find the discussion rarely reaches the ‘front office’ in most financial institutions,) however what I think is new are the tools and approach potentially available to build an efficient and workable solution and an ever-increasing (implicit) pull from the front office due to the rise and rise of peer-to-peer multi-party transactions. Watch this space.
