The EDM Council has been invited and has joined a coalition of industry and academia calling for the creation of a “National Institute of Finance” in the United States. The immediate goal of the NIF is US legislation to establish a new Federal agency to implement standards (semantic tags, identifiers and classification schemes), build and maintain reference and legal entity databases, construct a system-wide transaction and position data warehouse and provide analytical capabilities to help agencies that will become part of the Financial Services Oversight Council monitor risk and oversee systemic vulnerabilities. The Council is an active participant on both their Data and Legislative Subcommittees.

Legislation defining the creation of the “Institute” has been drafted and is now being evaluated by staff supporting the Senate Banking Committee – as well as a number of other legislators and regulatory agencies. We are coordinating our activities with our European colleagues. The standards objectives (as you would expect) is based on our semantics and entity identification activities. The initiative is gaining traction. The pace is frenetic. No predictions yet, but we are moving closer to having the principles of EDM specified as part of global regulatory reform.

We encourage all interested parties to sign the petition to create the NIF.It's located at http://www.gopetition.com/petitions/create-the-national-institute-of-finance.html. The public website for the NIF is http://www.ce-nif.org/ .