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Is your firm leveraging data to drive growth? If you're unsure or the answer is no, it's time to take a closer look at your data analytics capabilities. After all, data is now considered an essential economic asset just like currency or gold, meaning no organization can afford to ignore it as a resource to supercharge business insights and enable smarter decision making. In fact, ECI considers the topic one of the most pivotal issues financial services organizations face today.
The Challenge of Data Complexity
As financial organizations modernize and evolve IT systems, the corresponding growth in data availability can become a double-edged sword: Sure, there’s more data available to leverage for business insights and decision support; but unlocking that value requires organizations to first mature their data management and analytics abilities. Otherwise, firms are surrounded by information they can’t understand or decipher.
Today, the data landscape holds unprecedented complexity in the hundreds of different data feeds and data sources that financial firms must navigate in administering various funds and managing transactions. What’s more, for every data source, you must do more than simply achieve access; you also have to ensure the right access and governance controls are in place to manage each of these data sets in a secure and compliant manner.
Ultimately, the business need for organizations is to assemble a single source of truth across this complex array of data systems and sources. So, for instance, your accounting data may be in one system; your portfolio data may be in another system and administered by a different team; and your ESG data may be stored in a third-party platform. These diverse data sources need to be brought together for a more unified and actionable view of the entire business landscape; and smaller firms need to do all this on an affordable and technologically manageable scale.
Building the Right Data Analytics Program
Fortunately, ECI can deliver a wealth of useful guidance and tips to help organizations rise to the challenge of maturing their data analytics capabilities. One of the first steps any firm should take is to conduct rigorous discovery and baselining of all the data that currently touches the organization – including where it’s stored; how it’s secured; when and where it is allowed to be shared; and who has access.
These insights can then inform key architectural decisions on how to improve infrastructure and processes to better access and connect all data sources. Additionally, superior data analytics programs typically rely on automation to standardize and scale the process of ingesting, categorizing and contextualizing data. These steps are essential to support analytics at scale for a diverse range of users leveraging the same data for multiple, domain-specific needs.
For instance, the same portfolio data can feed queries from one user interested in the profile of your investments; another analyst interested in your gender and ethnic diversity within the organization; and another user focused on your green credentials. Throughout, agile frameworks are typically employed to iteratively update and optimize the data analytics engine as new data becomes available over time.
The above efforts represent the blueprint for building a robust data analytics program to suit your firm. But turning the blueprint into reality within actual IT systems typically requires the help of a trusted MSP partner like ECI. Cross disciplinary expertise in data science, governance, IT automation, security, financial sector compliance and other skill sets is typically out of reach for most organizations. The right MSP can provide all these resources to design, deploy and maintain a data analytics program that turns data into decisions in your organization for maximum value generation and competitive advantage.
