Andrew G Haldane: Towards a common financial language1
Speech by Mr Andrew G Haldane, Executive Director, Financial Stability, Bank of England, at
the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA) "Building a Global Legal
Entity Identifier Framework" Symposium, New York, 14 March 2012.
* * *
The views are not necessarily those of the Bank of England or the Financial Policy Committee. We would like to
thank Alan Ball, Peter Davies, Priya Kothari and Colin Miles for comments and contributions.
In the first book of the Old Testament, God punishes the builders of the Tower of Babel for
their folly. The choice of punishment is revealing. God replaces the Earth's then-common
language with multiple tongues. The costs of that original sin are still being felt. Today, there
are nearly 7000 languages spoken globally across fewer than 300 nation states.
Linguistic diversity has of course cultural benefits. But this comes at some considerable
economic cost. A common language has been found to increase dramatically bilateral trade
between countries, by more than 40%.2 It has been found to increase bilateral investment
between two countries by a factor of three or more.3 In Iceland at the start of the century as
much as 3% of annual GDP was, quite literally, lost in translation.4
Finance today faces a similar dilemma. It, too, has no common language for communicating
financial information. Most financial firms have competing in-house languages, with
information systems silo-ed by business line. Across firms, it is even less likely that
information systems have a common mother tongue. Today, the number of global financial
languages very likely exceeds the number of global spoken languages.
The economic costs of this linguistic diversity were brutally exposed by the financial crisis.
Very few firms, possibly none, had the information systems necessary to aggregate quickly
information on exposures and risks.5 This hindered effective consolidated risk management.
For some of the world's biggest banks that proved terminal, as unforeseen risks swamped
undermanned risk systems.
These problems were even more acute across firms. Many banks lacked adequate
information on the risk of their counterparties, much less their counterparties' counterparties.
The whole credit chain was immersed in fog. These information failures contributed
importantly to failures in, and seizures of, many of the world's core financial markets,
including the interbank money and securitisation markets.
Yet there are grounds for optimism. Spurred by technology, other industries have made
enormous strides over recent years towards improving their information systems. Improved
visibility of the network chain has transformed their fortunes. It has allowed the management
of risks previously unmanageable. And it has allowed the development of business practices
and products previously unimaginable.
To gauge that, we begin by discussing the progress made by two well-known industrial
networks over recent years - product supply chains and the world wide web. For both, a
common language was the prime-mover behind a technological transformation. That
transformation has delivered huge improvements in system resilience and productivity.
Compared with these industries, finance has been a laggard. But the tide is turning. Since
the crisis, significant progress has been made by financial firms, regulators and trade
associations in developing information systems and the common data standards necessary
to underpin them. Conferences like this are evidence of that.
At the same time, there is a distance to travel before banking harvests the benefits other
industries have already reaped. A common financial language has the potential to transform
risk management at both the individual-firm and system-wide level. It has the potential to
break-down barriers to market entry, leading to a more decentralised, contestable financial
sector. And it thereby has the potential to both boost financial sector productivity and tackle
the too-big-to-fail problem at source.
There is no technological barrier to this transformation. And private and social interests are
closely aligned as improved information systems are a public as well as a private good. That
public-private partnership is one reason why such good progress has been made over the
past few years. So stand back for a good news story - a story of how finance could transform
both itself and its contribution to wider society.
Lessons from other industries
In look and feel, the topology of the financial network is part product, part information
network. The multiple products and counterparties of financial firms have a close parallel in
the behaviour of non-financial firms operating in a product supply chain. And the complex
configuration of multiple criss-crossing nodes and links in the financial web are hallmarks too
of global information webs.
Yet despite these similarities, finance lags by a generation both products and information in
the management of its network. Today's financial chains mimic product supply chains of the
1980s and the information chains of the 1990s. For global supply chains and the internet,
their fortunes were transformed by a common language. This enabled them to become
global in scale and scope and highly adaptive to new demands and technologies. They are
astonishing success stories.
(a) Product Supply Chains
On 26 June 1974, Clyde Dawson bought a pack of chewing gum from a Marsh supermarket
in Troy Ohio. Twenty-five years later, this event would be celebrated in a Smithsonian
Institute exhibition. This was the first time a barcode had been scanned.
Barcodes are the most recognisable element of what, over the past 40 years, has become a
global language. Before barcodes, suppliers, manufacturers and retailers recorded their
products in bespoke languages. This was a recipe for inefficiency, as goods were recorded
and re-recorded in different tongues. It was also a recipe for confusion as there was no
simple means of understanding and communicating along the supply chain. The costs of
translation were of Icelandic proportions.
In the early 1970s, members of the Grocery Manufacturers of America (GMA) set about
tackling this problem. The result was a Uniform Product Code (UPC), a common standard for
recording the identity of products. The UPC was launched in 1974, at first for retail products,
using barcode technology. It immediately took off. By 1977, the UPC had become a global
standard for retail products.
During the 1980s and 1990s, this UPC technology extended its reach along the supply chain.
It did so by developing a system for locating products as well as identifying them. A Global
Location Number (GLN) was introduced in 1980, tying products to fixed locations. And in
1989, the Serial Shipping Container Code (SSCC) was devised, enabling products to be
grouped in transit.
These common data standards provided, for the first time ever, a vista on the global supply
chain - a map of the end-to-end production conveyor belt as products moved between
locations. This transformed production processes. For example, invoicing, purchase orders,
despatch advice and receipt advice could now be standardised across firms in the new
common language.
Because the language of individual countries was no longer an obstacle to trade, these
standards helped to expand existing, and to create new, global supply links. From the 1980s
onwards, supply chains lengthened and strengthened across geographic boundaries. They
became genuinely global. Between 1980 and 2005, the total value of world exports
quintupled.6 A common language was their glue.
Entering this century, these technologies have continued to extend their reach. The
introduction of the Global Data Synchronisation Network (GDSN) in 2004 standardised
product descriptions with over 1,500 attributes, such as width, depth and height. Products
were now recorded in a consistent way globally. At a stroke, a unique "DNA string" had been
devised for each global product, describing its genetic make-up.
With an emerging language of product identifiers, locators and attributes, the stage was set
for an umbrella organisation to maintain and develop these common standards. After 2005,
this umbrella unfolded in the form of GS1. This is a global not-for-profit association. GS1
currently has over 1.5 million members and maintains information on over 40 million products
in its global registry. This is the evolving, expanding, adapting genetic codebook for the
global supply chain.
(b) World Wide Web
On October 29 1969, the first-ever message was sent between computer networks at UCLA
and Stanford Universities. The message was only five characters long ("login"). It was an
inauspicious start. The system crashed on the letter "g". The stage was nonetheless set for
what has become a technological revolution.
By the end of 1969, a network of campus computers - an embryonic internet - was up and
running. Applications began to emerge, allowing this evolving network to expand its reach.
Take electronic mail.
In the early 1970s, the US Defence Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency
(ARPA) developed network electronic mail capabilities. In 1979, Compuserve opened up
electronic mail to a rising community of personal computer users. In the same year, two
graduate students at Duke University, Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis, developed Usenet,
allowing users to post messages to (a precursor of) internet forums.
By 1983, after more than a decade of evolutionary development, a universal Internet Protocol
was agreed. This provided infrastructure and common technical standards for this evolving
communications network. But the languages of the internet remained technical and diffuse.
That meant it largely remained the domain of the nerds - libraries and universities.
In March 1989, Tim Berners-Lee, a British software engineer working at CERN, the
Geneva-based nuclear research lab, wrote a memo to his boss Mike Sendall.7 It was a
suggestion for improving information management at CERN, replacing the silo-ed approach
to information storage and search with a more interconnected approach. Sendall described
the proposal as "vague but exciting".
A year on, Berners-Lee made his proposal less vague and more exciting. A paper with
Robert Cailliau proposed the development of a World Wide Web, with links between and
within documents creating a web-like information network.8 At the centre of this web was a
common language - Hyper-Text Markup Language (HTML). This was a new lingua franca for
computers, allowing them to communicate irrespective of their operating systems and
underlying technologies.
To accompany this new language, Berners-Lee created some new co-ordinates for this
global web - Universal Resource Identifiers, the most well-known of which is the URL
(Uniform Resource Locator). These were a unique character string for identifying web
locations. With a common language, common locators and an agreed syntax, the stage was
set for the web to spread (as Berners-Lee had originally envisioned) worldwide.
At first progress was slow. In June 1993, there were still only 130 websites. But as web
browsers became available for home use, the web began to spread exponentially. By 1996,
over 15 million users were surfing 100,000 websites. Today, 7 million web sites and around
the same number of users are added each week, with over 2 billion web users in almost
every country in the world. A common language has been the linchpin. Like all good
languages, HTML has had to adapt to these changing demands, with Version 5 currently
under development.
Since 1994, the evolution and the maintenance of web standards have been overseen by a
global organisation - the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). W3C, like GS1, is a
not-for-profit organisation, with 346 members drawn from across the globe.9
Measuring the benefits of a common language
So taking these two examples, what benefits has a common language been able to deliver?
(a) Improving risk management in firms
Gobal companies face a hugely complex logistical problem. They manage multiple products,
in multiple locations, with multiple suppliers operating to multiple time-lines. Effective
inventory management along the supply chain is vital. Common data standards and
technology have together transformed this process.
Global supply chain giants come no larger than Wal-Mart Stores Inc. It employs more than
2 million people in 28 countries across nearly 10,000 stores. Its total revenues, at over $400
billion annually, are almost four times higher than its nearest competitor. By comparison, one
of the world's largest banks by assets, Citigroup, has revenues of just over $100 billion, with
just over 250,000 employees.
Automation of supply chain management, facilitated by data standardisation, has been
central to Wal-Mart's success. Wal-Mart was an early adopter of common data standards
and technology. By 1998, around 85% of Wal-Mart's retail products were distributed using
standardised barcodes and handheld computers. These identified and tracked the location of
products in real time as they were distributed to individual stores.
This technology has since been extended to individual stores. Manual barcode scanning of
shelves and supplies has been largely replaced by contactless tagging of container products
using radio frequency GS1 identifiers. In 2010, Wal-Mart started tagging individual items,
further improving inventory-tracking. By combining real-time inventory and point-of-sale data,
stock-checking and shelf-replenishment has become almost fully-automated. Thinking
machine has replaced man throughout the supply chain.
This "warehouse-to-shelf" inventory management process has transformed Wal-Mart's
business. Full visibility of the internal supply chain has enabled close to real-time tracking
and management of stock across many of its stores. It has allowed genuinely consolidated
inventory risk management. The results have been tangible. The risk of being out-of-stock in
Wal-Mart stores equipped with radio frequency technology has been found to be 30% lower
than in stores without that technology.10
More resilient supply chain management has also been a trademark of a number of
web-based companies. In September 1995, Pierre Omidyar created a website for online
buying and selling.11 He did the programming over a weekend and launched Auction Web
using the domain name he had bought for his freelance consultancy Echo Bay Technology
Group (ebay.com).
Omidyar put a broken laser pointer for sale. At the end of its first day, the site had attracted
no visitors. Even as transactions grew, so did disputes between buyers and sellers.
Transactions between anonymous traders created enormous information problems. With
sellers knowing more than buyers about their goods, the market risked being flooded by
"lemons".12 For a time, Omidyar appeared to have created the first-ever global market for
lemons.
Information markets such as these are notoriously fragile. But the web, underpinned by its
common language, provided eBay with a solution to its gigantic lemons problem. Omidyar
adapted the site to allow buyers and sellers to give each other feedback on transactions,
positive or negative. These scores created a method for buyers to assess risk. It also
incentivised good behaviour. Bad traders were removed from the supply chain, while good
traders were rewarded with reputational incentives to strengthen their links.
With information problems mitigated, eBay has gone from strength to strength. It currently
has 100 million active users.13 The feedback system has remained eBay's core risk
assessment tool. It has since been emulated by other web-based marketplaces, such as
Etsy and Amazon. Each uses the information embedded in the web, conveyed in a common
language, to squeeze even the largest of lemons.
(b) Improving risk management across firms
The potential to improve resilience through a common language is, if anything, greater still
when managing risks across the network. Take Wal-Mart. It is connected to all of its
suppliers through a central inventory management network, giving suppliers full visibility of
product inventories at Wal-Mart stores. Indeed, Wal-Mart requires that its suppliers use this
network information to manage the frequency, timing and quantity of their product shipments
to its stores. This is known as the continuous replenishment process.14
The level of supply chain visibility in this system has enabled suppliers to fine-tune their
responses to shifts in demand. This reduces the risk of being out of stock. It also reduces
instabilities which otherwise arise along the supply chain between manufacturers,
wholesalers and retailers. For example, it is well-known that small shifts in demand tend to
get magnified as they move along the supply chain. This phenomenon is known as the
"bull-whip effect".15
The longer are supply chain lead-times, and the greater inventory uncertainties, the more
destabilising are these bull-whip oscillations. Wal-Mart's continuous replenishment process
has compressed dramatically those lead times and uncertainties. As a result, the crack of the
bull-whip has been nullified along the product supply chain, reducing system-wide
instabilities.
For Wal-Mart, common standards have revolutionised ex-ante risk management, allowing
real-time aggregation and visibility of risks and opportunities along the supply chain.16 For
other industries, a common language has also transformed ex-post risk containment. Take
the pharmaceuticals industry.
Building on existing GS1 standards, individual packets of drugs can now be assigned a
unique serial number by the manufacturer, along with information on the batch from which it
was produced and other relevant attributes. These data can be shared in a common pool
with retailers and distributors. As at Wal-Mart, the packet's location is logged at every stage
of the supply chain from factory to pharmacy.
This central supply chain information system has transformed drug risk management in a
crisis. In the past, before drug packets had unique identifiers, defective products would have
resulted in a mass recall of all packets of a certain drug type. This often caused massive
disruption to the manufacturer and generated panic, bordering on hysteria, among
consumers. The bullwhip effect was powerful and destabilising.
Today, those instabilities have been calmed courtesy of common standards and improved
technology. If a product needs to be recalled, the manufacturer updates the common data
pool with an instruction, alerting the distributor or dispenser at the next point in the supply
chain. If a recalled product has already been sold, the points of sale can be tracked and
those affected can be notified. Panic is no longer systemic; it is quickly localised.
(c) Mapping the network
If data are not standardised, mapping complex networks is a high-dimension jigsaw puzzle.
Understanding the underlying picture is taxing and time-consuming. Capturing the same data
in a standardised way means that plotting the network becomes a much simpler game of
join-the-dots. Experience with both product supply chains and the World Wide Web
demonstrate the benefits of doing just that.
In global product space, the recent work of Ricardo Hausmann and colleagues gives us
some tantalising glimpses of the possibilities. They have recently constructed an "Atlas of
Economic Complexity".17 This is a visual representation of the product categories that
contribute significantly to a country's exports. Those product categories can in turn be
mapped to measures of complexity. For example, iPhones are the fruits of a more complex
manufacturing process than ice-cubes.
This product network mapping provides new insights into trading opportunities and risks. For
example, it allows country-specific measures of economic complexity to be constructed.
These can explain almost three-quarters of the variation in income across countries. A one
standard deviation rise in a country's "economic complexity" has been found to increase its
long-term growth rate by a remarkable 1.6% per year.
If these numbers are even roughly right, this product atlas is a fantastic navigation device. It
could help guide countries towards investing in their most profitable industries. Because it
also shows how closely product types are linked, both within and across countries, product
and country complexity maps might also be used to help chart a course for industrial policy
and international trade.
The web is a higher-dimension network than the global supply chain. Navigating it is more
complex still. Early in its life, that seemed likely to retard its progress. In the early 1990s, web
search engines relied on the content of each page to determine its relevance. As the web
grew, simple keyword search was being overwhelmed by the web's size and complexity. By
the mid-1990s, search engines were lost in navigation.
In 1996, two Stanford students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, devised a solution.18 You are all
now familiar with its name. It was called "BackRub". Page and Brin saw the links between
websites, rather than the content within them, as the key to navigating the web. Using that
basic intuition, they created a search algorithm which calculated a ranking of the relative
importance of every web page in the global network. This ranking is known as PageRank.
By drawing explicitly on the information embedded in the network, PageRank produced
dramatically improved web search capabilities. By now, the graduate project had become a
company called Google. The vast, growing multi-dimensional cats-cradle of global
information could now be sliced and diced in fractions of a second. Navigating the web no
longer required a specialist pilot; it could be mapped by a novice. The World Wide Web had
been given an instantaneous backrub.
That has yielded vast productivity improvements. Google itself is today valued at around
$200 billion, having gained in value by on average $284 million every week of its life.
Applications of Google's network mapping technology grow by the day. For example, Google
indicators produced from the analysis of the popularity of search terms such as "estate
agents" or "motor vehicles" have outperformed some existing indicators of house prices and
motor sales.19
And what has allowed the World Wide Web to be Googled in this way? A common language.
(d) Lowering barriers to entry
Creating a common language also has the potential to transform the industrial organisation
of an industry. It does so by simultaneously expanding the frontiers of a global network and
by lowering the barriers to entering it. This allows new companies, with innovative and
superior product offerings, to quickly erode the market share of incumbents. Higher
productivity and growth have been the fruits.20
Global supply chains are one example. Prior to GS1 standards, small suppliers faced an
uphill struggle connecting to global supply chains. Big suppliers viewed them as unreliable
given the costs and difficulty of small suppliers executing real-time inventory management.
Only large firms with big IT budgets could afford the sunk costs of such systems.
Today, a real-time inventory management system can be built using GS1 standards for a few
thousand dollars. Small firms can connect to global product webs, through nodes such as
Wal-Mart's central inventory system, in the same way they might connect to a Facebook
friend. A common language has levelled the playing field between the corner shop and the
supermarket.
The transformative powers of a common language have been even more striking in such
well-established industries as publishing, music, advertising, news and retailing. For
decades, large incumbent firms dominated these markets - EMI, Borders, Tower Records.
Yet in less than a decade, new entrants with new business processes have completely
reshaped the industrial landscape. Take publishing.
Until 2007, publishing was an industry essentially unaltered since Gutenberg. The printing
presses, while bigger and faster, would have been recognisable to a fifteenth century printer.
Copying and distributing a book to the public involved a complex chain of printers,
wholesalers and retailers. This lengthy supply chain added both risk and cost. It also created
a significant barrier to entry for new authors who were reliant on publishers to get their
physical books onto physical shelves.
Digital publishing and distribution has fundamentally changed this market. Both the books
and the shelves are now electronic. Authors can now format books for e-readers in a couple
of hours. Sales platforms like Amazon Kindle Direct give access to a worldwide audience
with essentially no upfront costs. Supply can close to perfectly match demand as the
marginal cost of creating and delivering an eBook is effectively zero.
This digital revolution has caused barriers to entry to plummet while simultaneously raising
returns to author entry: they now receive as much as 85% of the royalties from an eBook,
compared to as little as 10% from a physical book. Previously unpublished authors now sell
millions of books. The incumbent middle men - book publishers, distributors and
retailers - have found their lunch devoured in one sitting. In effect, they have been
disintermediated by technology and (in a delicious irony) a common language.
This pattern has been replicated in the music industry. For half a century or more, the music
supply chain was unchanged. New acts were discovered by large record labels who
distributed physical goods (vinyl, tapes or CDs) to retailers for sale to the public. Over the
past decade, the costs of copying and distributing music have fallen to close to zero. As in
publishing, barriers to new artist entry have plummeted. The middle-men - music production
companies and distributors - have seen their piece of the pie eaten.
And as a direct result of this industrial transformation, the pie itself appears to have grown.
Studies of the contributors to productivity growth since the 1960s indicate that the two
top-performing sectors have been retail and wholesale.21 This is attributed to improvements
in business processes in these sectors - the "Wal-Mart effect". It is also attributed to wider
and faster dissemination of innovation courtesy of new entrants.
Economist W. Brian Arthur believes this digitised network of automated processes, linked by
a common language, may have put the world on the cusp of a second industrial revolution.22
Arthur describes a "second economy" - the digital root system of the physical
economy - and predicts it could become larger than the physical economy within a couple of
decades. If so, those estimated benefits of a common language - in this case HTML and
GS1 rather than Hindi and Mandarin - will need revising upwards.
A. Common language for finance
Since the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the international financial policy community and the
private financial sector has begun laying the foundations of their own second economy. A
sequence of international initiatives, often led by the private sector, has taken us materially
closer to constructing a global financial map. The co-ordinates of that map are defined by a
fledgling global financial language.
This global mapping effort is underpinned by two, mutually supporting, pillars: greater
financial data to help forge links in the financial information chain and common standards for
recording and aggregating these data. Progress on data collection has been material. The
Financial Stability Board is overseeing efforts to improve data, including on global banking
interconnections, shadow banks and OTC transactions data.23
Yet the full benefits of this deeper and richer array of financial network information will only
be realised if these data can be simply aggregated within and across firms. That calls for
common data describers and standards. Recent legislation recognises that. In the US, the
Dodd-Frank Act created the US Treasury's Office of Financial Research (OFR), which has as
a core objective data standardisation.24 In Europe, the new European Markets Infrastructure
Regulation (EMIR) embeds common data standards across the EU.25
The roots of these legislative initiatives were grown during the September 2009
G20 summit.26 Out of this, the Financial Stability Board (FSB) initiated a programme which
culminated in a report to G20 Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors in October
2010. This set out a vision of common standards which would allow global financial data
aggregation.27 Like Berners-Lee's 1989 memo, it was vague but exciting. But in the reports
that followed, two crucial ingredients were identified: a Legal Entity Identifier (or LEI) and a
Product Identifier (or PI).28
Though these acronyms are new, the principles underpinning them are not. LEIs are
effectively the nouns of a new financial vocabulary, naming the counterparties to each
financial transaction. Meanwhile, PIs are the adjectives of this new vocabulary, describing
the elements of each financial transaction. Together, LEI-nouns and PI-adjectives are key
building blocks of a new common financial language.
LEIs and PIs have natural counterparts in the world of product supply chains. For LEIs read
GLNs - the Global Location Numbers that uniquely define nodes in the global supply chain.
GLNs are ultra-flexible. They can denote something as macro as a Wal-Mart warehouse or
as micro as a specific shelf in a Wal-Mart store. They provide the co-ordinates of a
high-definition map of the global supply chain.
For PIs read GTINs (Global Trade Identification Numbers) and the GDSN (Global Data
Synchronisation Network). Together, these identifiers define not only products (such as
toothpaste) but their attributes (the dimensions of the box the toothpaste is stored in). They
too are ultra-flexible. These identifiers define the DNA string for everything from chocolate
wafers to collateral swaps.
LEIs and PIs are being cast from a similar mould to GLNs and GTINs. International efforts so
far have focussed on global LEIs. These are means of capturing, in a common data string,
the old banking maxim of "know your counterparty". In today's financially interconnected
world, knowing your counterparty may be insufficient. So global LEIs aim to barcode
counterparty linkages at any order of dimensionality.
In November 2010, the OFR issued a policy statement on LEIs.29 This kicked-off an industry
process, led by the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA), aimed at
settling on a single, industry-wide entity identification standard. This industry process formally
began in January 2011, issued its requirements document in May 2011 and recommended a
consortium led by the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation (DTCC) as its preferred
provider in July 2011.
DTCC is currently running a private sector entity identification pilot project, starting with over
the counter derivatives. Although this market is fairly concentrated, building the database still
poses challenges. DTCC anticipates the database could contain over 1 million entities. This
pilot will provide valuable experience when moving to a broader range of products and
market participants.
The FSB is constructing an LEI roadmap, harnessing the efforts of both official and private
sectors. Its destination is a single, global LEI standard. As announced last week, significant
progress is being made across five fronts: governance, operational model, scope and
access, funding and implementation and phasing.30 The FSB will present its LEI
recommendations to the next G20 summit in June 2012.
Creating a PI for finance is altogether more complex. Finance is in the pre-barcode era for
retail products or the pre-web era of the internet. But enough work has already been done to
demonstrate that PIs are feasible. As long ago as 1997, the International Organization for
Standardization (ISO) released a standard for the Classification of Financial Instruments
(ISO 10962) and designated the Association of National Numbering Agencies (ANNA) as the
registration body for this standard.31
More recently, following G20 commitments, the industry has been working to standardise
classification of OTC derivative products. The International Swaps and Derivatives
Association (ISDA) is working with derivatives clearing houses and other financial institutions
to use Financial product Mark-up Language (FpML), which is already used in the industry for
communications and processes, to provide a standardised presentation of each listed or
cleared product. ISDA published the latest version