Securities Reference-Data Board Examiner — Market Infrastructure

The mandate

The risk committee repeatedly asks whether instrument and corporate-action reference controls are proportionate to the few errors capable of disrupting clearing or settlement, or whether current remediation merely reconciles more vendor fields. Security aliases, venue identifiers, lifecycle states and event elections cross several utilities and proprietary sources, making apparently minor disagreement consequential at specific cut-offs.

The adviser will reserve two days each month for chair preparation, management challenge and investment-paper review, and attend six scheduled Board Risk Committee meetings. A written view on a severe reference incident or resilience decision is expected within one German business day. Formal investigation, control testing or supplier selection requires separate approval and cannot be treated as routine cadence.

The appointment begins in January 2027 and runs twelve months through the annual resilience assessment. At month ten, the board will decide whether internal leaders can sustain the critical-instrument decision framework. Any successor term requires a fresh board vote, specific standing question and conflict review; management cannot renew it or roll unused advisory time into later remediation.

This examiner has no line authority, executive responsibility, regulated-function delegation, incident command, vendor vote or independent-assurance role. Advice challenges evidence but cannot approve instruments, settlement policy or risk acceptance. The COO, risk officers and market executives retain decisions, and the organisation may not cite the adviser’s presence as certification that reference controls are adequate.

Two other substantial appointments are permitted with full disclosure. Work for trading venues, clearing houses, central securities depositories, data vendors, custodians or programme bidders may create conflict. Involvement in the same instrument dispute or access to a competitor’s proprietary reconciliation performance can make recusal insufficient regardless of contractual confidentiality.

Why the board wants this voice

Directors understand systemic operations but lack a specialist who has governed instrument identity through issuance, trading, clearing, corporate action and settlement. Management teams present source-specific quality measures rather than decision exposure. The board wants a practitioner who can identify concentrated operational risk and challenge both excessive centralisation and unmanaged vendor dependency.

What you will own

• Press the committee to identify clearing, margin, settlement, entitlement and reporting decisions most sensitive to reference disagreement.
• Test whether instrument identity, classification, lifecycle, venue mapping and corporate-action terms remain effective-dated and historically reproducible.
• Challenge control measures that count reconciled fields while obscuring cut-off proximity, position concentration and downstream irreversibility.
• Shape risk-tiering and investment gates around decision consequence, source independence, correction speed, fallback and tested manual continuity.
• Probe vendor concentration, common-source dependence, licence restriction and exit feasibility beneath superficially redundant data feeds.
• Frame scenarios involving new issuance, identifier reuse, complex reorganisation, disputed election and late authoritative correction near settlement.
• Coach directors to separate source acquisition, reference stewardship, market-operation judgement and regulated risk acceptance in their minutes.

Candidate qualifications

• Held senior reference-data, market-operations or infrastructure-risk accountability within a venue, clearing house, depository, custodian or bank.
• Governed instrument and corporate-action identity across trading, clearing and settlement where effective-time differences caused material exposure.
• Redesigned controls around critical decision consequence rather than increasing reconciliation volume indiscriminately.
• Challenged vendor redundancy after proving common-source or common-transformation dependence across nominally separate feeds.
• Presented reference-data incidents and resilience choices directly to a regulated board or financial-market supervisor.
• Managed conflicts across infrastructures, banks, vendors, custodians, consultants and major transformation providers.

Non-negotiables

• Able to attend all six Frankfurt committee meetings and preserve the two-day monthly commitment for the complete term.
• Will disclose market-infrastructure, bank, vendor, custodian, audit and investment relationships before seeing control evidence.
• Accepts that instrument approval, incident command and regulated risk decisions remain with accountable client executives.
• Must bring securities-lifecycle operating depth; generic customer master-data or data-governance leadership is insufficient.

1. 49 words maximum. Describe a reference error whose materiality arose from settlement timing or position concentration rather than field count.
2. 49 words maximum. Which current venue, infrastructure, custodian or data-vendor relationships require board disclosure?
3. 49 words maximum. How would you test whether two instrument feeds provide genuine source independence rather than cosmetic redundancy?