This chapter begins with an Overview and objectives (Section 6.1) that summarizes the challenges facing the financial industry in keeping up with the acceleration of the pace of change, the degree of interdependence and volatility in the global economy. More than just IT horsepower, the importance of timely, accurate and appropriate data is key to being able to meet these challenges.

Perspectives on the banking industry (Section 6.2) describes the banking industry from the point of view of a widening set of perspectives, beginning with the types of products, services and customers which form the core of the business of banking, and expanding in scope to examine banking from an institutional and industry sector perspective.

A discussion of the domains and properties of the underlying and inter-related categories of data that comprise the foundation of banking is provided in Foundations of banking data infrastructure (Section 6.3).

We look at what to do from a business strategy perspective to address these issues in Financial risk information management planning (Section 6.4). Central to that assessment is the fact that regulators (and in particular agencies that are tasked with systemic risk management and oversight) ultimately need, and will expect to receive, consistent, accurate, timely and digestible data from tens of thousands of financial institutions.

Institutions comprising the source of all of those industry data must therefore previously have managed to implement their own firm-wide financial information infrastructure with internally consistent, accurate, timely and digestible data.