Michael Lock

With a mountain of transactional data, streaming feeds of real-time market data, and an influx of third party information available, the financial services sector has long been ripe with opportunity for insight.  While the advanced analytical techniques in use are the most visible aspect of generating insight, activities to organize, access, cleanse, and govern data are absolutely critical in developing an underpinning of valuable data.  Companies these days, particularly in the financial services sector, are responding with their wallets.  When it comes to spending, technology leaders need to make sure the infrastructure is robust and scalable, the environment and the data are secure and reliable, and the users are armed with the tools and applications required for their jobs. With those pieces in place, organizations typically then turn to analytics as a way to move from automation to optimization. Essentially, the tremendous amount of data created from these modern IT environments contains nuggets of wisdom that can be extracted with the right tools, and more importantly, the right data-driven mindset. 

A sound analytical strategy encourages activity and embraces a self-service methodology but also provides guidance and oversight from those close to the data.  This governance will be instrumental in preventing data quality issues, superfluous analyses and misguided decisions.  Enter master data management (MDM).  The technologies and processes underlying a typical MDM strategy not only provide oversight and access control, but also enable companies to track the origin and lineage of data to ensure safety and consistency in the decision process. 

The ideals of master data management (MDM) espouse consistency, quality, and efficiency applied toward different data domains such as customer data, product data, or supplier data. For many companies though, customer data stands out as the most valuable pool of information that ties back to just about every aspect of the company’s operations. Customers have a profile and a purchase history that connects with product data as well as financial data. Often times they have account managers or customer experience professionals assigned to them that connects with HR data. They have a regional dispersion that correlates with supply chain and vendor information. The list of these connections and correlations is extensive to say the least.