The financial and asset management industry is a data-driven business where data volumes and data requirements continue to grow exponentially. Across the industry, data is recognized as a strategic asset that can provide a competitive advantage. Firms are investing in data and data quality to facilitate investment decisions, deliver timely and accurate reports to clients, improve operational efficiencies, facilitate regulatory reporting, and mitigate risks.  

On a typical engagement, our starting point is the organization’s existing data strategy and data governance models – we take a holistic view of your current data sources, identify gaps, and define the analytics and other data needs where your business users can start to harness the power of data throughout your organization.  The primary  outcome we want to achieve for your organization is to define and build your Data Strategy, Data Management/Governance, and Data Analytics/Reporting.

Data Strategy is your organizations vision for data – or in other words a data blueprint.  The data strategy defines your transformation goals, which could be a new data lake or enterprise data warehouse.  Our view is that data management should be business-driven and not technology-driven. It must align with the overall business strategy, and create value for the business.  

Data Management is the data governance layer of how data is managed within your organization.  It defines data policies and standards, architecture, master data/gold copy, metadata and other frameworks.  Our view is that data management should be defined by the needs of the business and users and the data governance should be aligned to those needs.

Data Analytics/Reporting is how your organization users your data.  Typically it is the Reporting layer which could include Business Intelligence (BI) or other tools.  Our view is this layer should be as self-serve as possible.  For some organizations, this is typically challenging as they move from a batch-report mindset.  The goal is to empower all users within the organization to leverage and harness the power of data without having to request IT/technical help

At FINARCH, we are experts in implementing and supporting the industry leading data management systems such as Markit EDM, GAIN and Bloomberg.  We are able to support clients in selecting the best data platforms to achieve their data strategy.  Our Data Strategy Service uses FINARCH’s standard data strategy methodology, guidelines, and templates to ensure a robust, flexible and actionable outcome for your organizations data needs