Blog: David Loshin

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A Dream Case for DQ ROI

As a data quality practitioner who always preaches the value of determining return on investment, I relish the opportunity when a simple data quality problem has significant impact. Well, last week, my dream came true. As reported in December 9th's Washington Post, erroneously placed sell orders will end up costing a financial services firm approximately $225 million dollars (yes, I said million).

Apparently, the company "mistakenly sold 610,000 shares of J-Com Co. at 1 yen (less than 1 cent) per share, instead of fulfilling a client's request to sell just one share at 610,000 yen ($5,080)." The problem occurred because of an erroneous data entry mistake that was not caught at the time the order was placed.

The impacts of this mistake bubbled through the Japanese market, sending the Nikkei average down 1.95% (wow).

Actually, the Tokyo Stock Exchange is admitting some responsibility as well. This will probably result in some government directives to improve their business processes to enable the determination of suspect transactions such as this one.

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