EDDy – Challenge and Opportunity for Investment Compliance

Author Carol Schneider

With EDDy (Enhanced Data Delivery), data provider WM Datenservice is optimizing its master
data delivery to provide customers with a modern IT infrastructure, more flexibility in data
delivery, and increased efficiency in the data processing. For financial service providers, the new
infrastructure offers far-reaching optimization opportunities. The project was launched in 2018
and is currently in the customer test or parallel phase of data delivery. Production operation of
EDDy_neu is currently scheduled for April 24, 2023.

Investment compliance, the investment limit check, is one of the most important and at the same
time most sensitive areas in the organization of a financial services provider. The high quality of
master data of financial instruments plays a central role because it ensures efficient and costeffective review processes and increases the quality of review results and the speed of reaction in
case of emerging real violations of investment limits. The changeover within the scope of the
“EDDy_neu” project therefore also poses new challenges for investment limit auditing, not least
due to the changes in the content of the data deliveries. It is important to understand this new
“data world” in order to be able to ensure a correct and efficient investment limit check in the
future. In addition to new data structures, there will also be changes in formats, fields, and text
fields as well as issuer identification numbers and in the interest area.

The change affects the investment limit check in many ways. For example, conceptual preparatory
work is essential in order to be able to correctly represent the regulatory and customer-specific
requirements in the verification systems even after the changeover. Special attention should be
paid to data fields or attributes whose content is mapped by new fields or even completely
discontinued. This requires a fundamental adaptation of the mapping of the supplied attributes
that are used in the company’s asset inspection system. At the same time, the conversion or
adaptation of the sets of rules from the asset ceiling inspection offers opportunities for
optimization and the possibility to critically question and validate existing inspection logic and
auxiliary structures (e.g., the so-called “asset tree”). This offers a more than good opportunity for
a “health check-up” of the data and rule sets used in investment compliance. All measures are
intended to improve quality in the area of investment compliance.

EDDy offers the financial industry and in particular the investment compliance area, an
opportunity to verify and optimize the investment limit check in order to be able to cope with
regulatory and customer-specific requirements in the future and to avoid unnecessary violations
and the associated damage to reputation. It goes without saying that such adjustments lead to a
temporary increase in the need for specialized resources, which are not insignificant and can put
a strain on ordinary day-to-day operations.