Basel challenges big banks to improve risk data aggregation

Drawing together and managing vast amounts of risk data is a vitally important skill for today’s large banks, and regulators recently gave the industry some new standards to which it should aspire. But the ideal is still some way from reality. By Clive Davidson

"Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” This couplet, borrowed from the poet TS Eliot, is the uncharacteristically emotive opening to regulatory guidelines on the management and use of risk data, published by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision in January. For bank risk managers, the emotions the guidelines generate are mixed.

On the one hand, there is widespread agreement that the document, Principles for effective risk data