Data Management Special Report

Click here to download this report

A Perfect Combination 

At its core, the conversation around data management is fairly easy to understand: if you want to be able to analyze your data and then gain value from it, you have to be able to properly manage your data and get your systems, processes and governance in order. 

Data management and data analysis-it's not exactly a chicken-or-egg conversation, but quality in one area without the other is essentially the equivalent of a hamster running on a wheel, a lot effort but getting nowhere fast.

For this special report, we gathered together a five-person virtual roundtable of experts to discuss the greatest challenges facing firms. One common theme emerged covering, first, the explosion of data required to run a firm thanks to new regulations, and second, the desire to be able to analyze that data to provide business value. If you think about it, these are not new themes: the term big data is a relatively new "catchall", but financial services firms have been struggling with how best to corral their data since the invention of computers.

The evolution of data management today is around extracting value for things such as managing risk and monitoring anomalies both inside the firm and in the market as a whole. It's about pre-trade risk, post-trade analysis, and making sure that the firm is stable during volatile conditions. This simply cannot be achieved without clean, accurate, up-to-the-second information that is well organized, deliverable exactly when needed, and formatted in a way such that it can be drilled into and shuttled across business units as necessary.

So again, the basic premise of the conversation is easy: good data management can lead to effective data analysis. How you get to those goals, though, is incredibly complex, time- and resource-intensive, and represents a massive IT equation. It's not always easy to show immediate return on investment on these projects, but the firms that are willing to spend now will have a leg up on the competition.

Click here to download this report