Banks have much further to go collate data in a timely manner to meet their internal risk management requirements, let alone the increasing demands for information from regulators.Demand for this data may accelerate investment in meeting new standards for the consistency of data and also lead to a new class of skilled worker within banks.An industry panel at the Sibos 2012 conference in Osaka yesterday agreed that managing data may affect investment priorities and even inform the long term strategy of a bank.Simon Topping, a former UK banking regulator and now KPMG partner based in China, said "it's a very clear requirement on the shape of technology in institutions."Regulators are expecting that systems be capable of much more complexity and sophistication." Topping said regulators expected of globally active banks that they "be able to produce much more data not just for the regulation and management of the business but also macroeconomic analysis."Mark Lawrence, an industry consultant (and also former chief risk officer at ANZ) said that in 2008 many banks, when queried by regulators in the days leading up to the demise of Lehman Brothers, could not readily or accurately provide the level of their consolidated exposure to the investment bank."It's essential banks and supervisors know their consolidated exposure in a crisis."The Financial Stability Board, late last year called for banks to upgrade their data capabilities to a level where reports accurately reflect the risk.He said another regulatory body, the Basel Committee, in June this year suggested that banks be prevented from taking over other firms.Lawrence - who said he was drawing in part on his ANZ experience in offering the comment - said that "In many large banks there is an insufficient understanding of technology by the business leaders; what it can do, what it can't do."IT types built without understanding the underlying business need.""Business leaders need to understand the risk of data aggregation. Business leaders and IT leaders need to agree on a long term strategy for the bank."Lee Fulmer, head of cash management at JP Morgan, said one aim was to cross reference sources of data more effectively."What I want is an information architect in the business. I want to hire people who work for the Library of Congress or the British Museum."Fulmer wondered if the present fashion for data coded to meet the needs of one markup language - the "XML glob" - might be a future burden on banks."You can't take all the information and put in a capsule because you've got to open the capsule."Fulmer said banks need to prioritise projects that managed data and other compliance tasks."We all spend phenomenal amounts of money on compliance. Do we want to spend on 100 to 200 little projects."David Saul, chief scientist at State Street promoted the work of the Enterprise Data Management Council that aims to develop a library on ontologies that banks and regulators can reference to strip out inconsistency in the language of many financial products, such as derivatives.