One of the leading causes of poor data quality within financial firms is an institution’s lack of end-to-end (E2E) visibility, resulting from a siloed enterprise landscape. A silo is a singular collection of data that is ineffectively shared or used across an organization. As financial firms ingest and process mass amounts of data, it becomes increasingly complex to effectively manage all of this information. When data is acquired, it is stored in disparate systems, applications, and workflows throughout the institution’s infrastructure. Each of these data sources may consist of scattered, outdated, and duplicate records, resulting in disarray and disconnect.
These data or information silos create bottlenecks that significantly hurt a financial firm’s operational efficiency, regulatory compliance, and decision-making. Therefore, financial institutions must implement an effective E2E visibility tool to unify their landscape views and break down remaining silos.
Having a few silos may not seem like a big deal. However, silos prevent relevant data from being shared and acted upon in an effective and timely manner. In addition to this data model leading to inefficiencies, it also prevents the discovery of new data, relationships, and overall enterprise knowledge.
Additionally, data silos result in the following challenges:
Data silos lead to poor data quality.
When data is stored in disparate sources, inconsistencies, inaccuracies, or duplicates may occur. Without end-to-end visibility, relying on this type of data is a big challenge, as it can lead to ineffective decision making. When businesses move at the speed of light, can one confidently make important decisions without the full picture?
Fragmentation prevents the identification of a single source of truth.
As data ages, it can quickly become outdated, stale, and lose quality. Firms may be using data in mission-critical systems and applications that are irrelevant, insecure, or have ambiguous origins. Without a single source of truth, firms may need to make attestations about individual pieces of data before being able to make confident decisions. This process is laborious, expensive, and only applicable to retroactive data.
A lack of a unified view results in operational inefficiency.
Without end-to-end (E2E) visibility, firms are unable to view and improve their data as a whole. When an error occurs within a particular system silo, resources must be allocated to reconcile the inconsistency (at both the source system and downstream). These efforts can lead to duplicate investigations and false positives, resulting in increased operational costs.
Inaccurate, scattered data may result in heavy regulatory penalties.
For firms to stay compliant, they must be able to make specific quality assertions about their data—a significant challenge when data is stored in multiple systems and no unified, end-to-end view exists. As a result, firms may generate, or submit inaccurate regulatory reports, resulting in heavy fines or an increase in capital reserve requirements.
Silos prevent firms from gaining valuable insights, leading to misinformed decisions.
Identifying accurate business analytics, trends, and insights becomes extremely difficult when stakeholders cannot trust their data or gain a complete view across a workflow. This lack of E2E visibility can quickly result in misinformed business decisions when it comes to cash positions, exposure, risk, and other important metrics.
Financial firms must understand that gaining E2E visibility and breaking down silos needs to be a priority within their digital optimization strategy.
When a financial firm has a unified view across their organization, they are able to utilize, optimize, and monetize their data assets more effectively, improving their operational efficiency, regulatory compliance, and decision-making.
Firms can improve their operational efficiency.
With E2E visibility, firms can streamline their processes (such as exception management) and reduce operational resources.
Firms can meet regulatory requirements and confidently submit reports.
Provided with a unified view, financial institutions are able to confidently locate, alter, and submit their data to regulators for accurate and compliant reporting.
Business leaders can make timely and informed decisions.
With high-quality data and end-to-end visibility, business leaders can quickly identify and address actionable insights. They can easily access a unified view of all data in real-time, leading to more agile and informed decision-making.
To be successful, firms must implement the right E2E visibility tool to help them gain a holistic, unified view of their data across workflows. By gaining a complete view, firms can achieve continuous E2E data quality across all business processes and workflows.
Cuneiform® is the PeerNova® zero-code platform that automates data quality, E2E visibility, and process correctness in real-time. The solution unifies and standardizes data across disparate systems, applications, and workflows.
Through continuous high-quality data and Event Lineage™, Cuneiform enables financial firms to increase operational efficiency, improve business performance, and address executive, stakeholder, and regulatory inquiries confidently and promptly.
With automation and ongoing data quality checks across silos, the solution not only remedies existing data issues but also continuously manages and monitors data throughout its entire lifecycle. The platform creates E2E, integrated, and active lineages across disparate sources, in order to break down silos, ensure continuous data quality, and provide a unified view of all data and metadata.
If you are interested in learning about how the Cuneiform Platform can provide end-to-end (E2E) visibility to break down enterprise and data silos in your firm, request a demo!
