The financial services sector is an intensive data-driven industry that manages enormous volumes of confidential client and customer data. As they accumulate data at an incredible rate, it can give organisations a goldmine of analytics that contribute to growth and profitability.

But data management in financial institutions is complex and demanding. Huge volumes of data can often exist in an unorganised state and stored in disparate places. Each data type can vary, and multiple silos can lead to segmented access. Legacy systems can be difficult to shed and unifying data from a wide range of sources is challenging.

There are also increasing compliance burdens from the ever-growing number of strict regulations to keep data safe. Financial firms must comply with hundreds of existing and emerging regulations that put pressure on a company’s data management structure. Many financial institutions are struggling with an IT infrastructure made up of disparate systems across different departments, and often holding differing information on the same customers.

With big data comes big responsibility

Without a complete and accurate overview of the customer and data across the enterprise, many institutions may struggle to fully benefit from initiatives such as Know Your Customer (KYC) or Customer 360. These due diligence processes provide a valuable framework and guidelines to help organisations better understand the profile and legitimacy of potential customers.     

With vast amount of data, it’s crucial to establish a system that enables meaningful insights. Financial institutions need access to data that is up-to-date, consistent, and precise, and isn’t replicated elsewhere.  Bringing it all together in one coherent place is vital for long-term success.

Simplicity is the key

Enterprise data fabrics are primed to help with this. This emerging data management architecture connects multiple locations, types, and sources of data, and provides ways to access that data. It offers a much-needed architectural approach to accurate data visibility and intelligent curation across the entire business, without the problems associated with data warehouses and data lakes. Enterprise data fabrics transform and harmonise data from different sources on demand to make it usable and actionable for a wide variety of business applications.

Smart data fabrics take the approach a step further by supporting advanced data analytics and future-proofing data management. They incorporate a wide range of analytics capabilities, including data exploration, business intelligence, natural language processing, and machine learning. This enables organisations to gain new insights and power prescriptive services and applications.

Implementing this technology makes data more accessible from a smaller number of places, which helps institutions gain the agility needed to enhance data governance and operational efficiency. By having a more connected eco-system, the sharing of data can also become more seamless and, when using the right data platform technology, more secure.

Better practices increase the value of data

Using a smart data fabric to streamline data architecture can help financial institutions overcome the many complicated and diverse data management and data governance challenges. It reduces the amount of time spent processing and organising data and supports risk management by minimising compliance issues. It elevates the value of data, providing the right data just in time regardless of where it is stored.

Removing complexity can help financial services leverage data to anticipate customer needs and make more intelligent business decisions. It enables them to futureproof their operations, giving them the agility to rapidly evolve with changing market trends, from emerging regulation and customer demand, to market volatility and everything in between.

Smart data fabrics simplify data architecture and provides a consistent, accurate, real-time view of their data assets that significantly contributes to the improvement of data governance amongst financial services organisations. However, this is just the tip of the iceberg, as it can also enhance security, speed, and agility, and allow institutions to achieve elegant simplicity within their IT estate.

A data architecture fit for the future

In a climate of fierce competition, financial institutions must rethink their approaches to data and adapt their current data management strategies to be ready for the future. Data management systems that have been prevalent in the past can no longer handle the volumes of data or the demands of that data needed to move businesses forward. This is an information age and data is a business’s greatest asset. The financial institutions that don’t successfully modernise their data architecture now risk losing customers, market share, and profits.