End-Users Must Understand Their Data Products Better, Paris Delegates Told

End-user firms need to understand their existing products "much, much better" to avoid spending money unnecessarily on additional data, according to speakers at this week's Paris Financial Information Summit.

During a session about sound data management strategies, Sue Baldwin, executive director and global head of vendor management at JP Morgan, said end-user firms must have robust governance frameworks, policies and processes in place to comply with increasing regulation and be efficient.

"If you haven't got [your policies and procedures] embedded correctly and you haven't educated your people on the ground about how they use the data and what it is used for, you are going to spend more money than you need to [...] but also you might fall foul of some of those controls you put in place," she said.

Baldwin highlighted the importance of having clear operational processes in place for the procurement of additional data, and said end-user firms must fully understand the products they already have. "We buy lots of products. We don't really know 100% what that product gives, what is in that contract, how much that contract covers or we don't get the best out of what we currently have," she said. "Instead, we go and source something else because we think that is a better thing to do. We tend not to look back at what we have got and what scope we might have within the contracts we might have [...]. We should really understand our products much, much better."

Nick Murphy, product owner at Asset Control, the provider of financial data management systems and services, said it is essential for firms to constantly review their data needs.

"I have seen many cases where [end-user firms] don't even have the product any more that the data they are buying supports. So you are buying data, but you don't even have the product you use it for. It goes back to governance," Murphy explained. "You need to have something in place that constantly reviews why you need this data, how you can use it more efficiently, whether you need it at all, whether you need it every day."  

Alain Robert-Dautun, head of risk management at Sycomore Asset Management, said his firm has done an audit of how data is used by each of its business units. "We have tried to identify what are the needs and what are the wants of the people. We have used a consultant to do that analysis of the company and see how we can build a better organization," he said.