5 things we learned about data quality from Adox’s Gert Raeves

As an industry we kid ourselves we’ve solved STP.

It’s simply not the case, we need to eat humble pie. It’s not enough to just solve at ingestion or in a single application. Processes may be unique, and there’s always a varying range of systems, applications, customers, products with pricing, valuations, risk management criteria. But data items from a business perspective are all the same. There is no end-to-end process but there is end-to-end data. Don’t try to fix it in a one-off place. The problem is only solved when you take a data lifecycle approach and accept that you’ll be doing this forever. We have to take data seriously. As an industry, it’s what we take in and it’s what we produce.

It’s all bad news when we surveyed on the state of the industry’s data quality

Missing or late data is a multiple daily challenge for 31% of firms and this means firms are failing at the first hurdle. Firms need constant updates to their data to be able to deliver their most basic services: making investment and trading decisions, pricing securities, valuing portfolios, measuring risk and performance and so on. Data exceptions are pervasive for all types of firms and types of data exceptions. Only one type of data exception (incompatible formats) was reported to occur ‘almost never’ by just 10% of firms. Click here to see all the stats in the white paper.

Not all data is created equal and the winning firms are those that take data quality seriously

Building composite data sets, bespoke valuation methodology, creating complex derivatives – these represent the data that is of the highest value to firms. It is also the most complex. And this is the data that is creating the highest volume of exceptions, having the biggest impact on available resource and getting delayed.

20% cost reductions are up for grabs

Those taking the survey estimated that, if you get data exceptions across the transaction lifecycle right, they would expect to reduce costs by up to 20%. That’s huge.

Want to hear it from the horse’s mouth? Then click here to listen to Gert’s podcast and find out more and also learn what else firms need to do to strike out on the winning path.