FOW Professional - Broadening horizons: Informed access to global markets

One of the standout features of FOW Professional is that it brings together FOW’s comprehensive reference data with timely market insights, focused industry analysis and volumes data, to enable users to build a complete picture of market activities and trends.

FOW Professional meets this ‘needs’ gap, through a universally accessible, user-friendly portal that delivers the right data - and market intelligence - to different types of user to meet differing user needs.

Autumn 2024 will herald a major milestone in FOW’s history with the launch of FOW Professional, a new online platform, and new way to deliver all of FOW’s content in one place

The Merriam Webster dictionary defines ‘symbology’ as a system - and the interpretation of symbols. It also defines it as ‘the art of expression by symbols’ which if applied to the confusion of symbols used to describe specific derivatives reference data might suggest a more abstract than realist art form.

This week marked the 16th anniversary of the FIA IDX in London - Walt Lukken, President and CEO of FIA opened the event with a keynote address that touched on the developments and challenges facing the global derivatives market, and particularly the potential impacts of a ‘historic election year’ for Europe, the UK and North America.

The fast-approaching Eid al-Adha holiday, the second of the two main holidays celebrated in Islam that this year begins on June 14, is a timely opportunity to look at another essential element of financial markets reference data - exchange holiday dates.

The global Futures and Options market continues to grow exponentially, year on year, in terms of the absolute number and volumes of F&O instruments issued and traded, and especially the explosive growth in trading activity in newer markets. In the APAC region, for example, futures and options (and other derivatives) trading is gaining huge momentum and represents an increasingly large share of the ‘global derivatives wallet’. It is estimated that this region’s trading volumes doubled in 2023, with particularly significant activity in India and China. In India alone, activity on major exchanges including the National Stock Exchange leapt around 80% in equity-related derivative transactions (and around 30% for energy, agriculture and precious metals).

Data normalisation - standardising the presentation of data to ensure it is consistent across required fields and records - is an essential component of effective financial data management, enabling reference data in particular to be recognised, interrogated and incorporated into required data workflows much more easily, and minimising the risk of reconciliation and compliance ‘fails’.

Not only is there a requirement to report additional information, EMIR Refit also places enormous emphasis on enhancing and harmonising the quality of the data itself to support end to end validation and data reconciliation obligations, and to mitigate the risk of misreporting - and having to report associated reporting failures.