Less Than Half of Financial Services Companies Manage Data Properly, Finds DataFlux Study

Release date: 7/22/2009

Study assesses data governance opinions and practices amongst financial services companies

CARY, N.C. (July 22, 2009) — DataFlux, a leading provider of data quality and data integration solutions, today announced the findings of the North American Financial Services Sector Study, designed and conducted by Lodestar Research, a Princeton, NJ-based research and strategy consultancy.

The findings indicate that companies in the financial services sector are growing more aware of the role data quality and data governance play in regulatory compliance, business decision-making and customer relations. However, the survey also showed that 46% of organizations do not manage data at the enterprise or cross-functional level, providing the potential for inconsistent, inaccurate and unreliable data to inhibit corporate growth and risk mitigation efforts.

Other key findings from the study include:

• 54% of respondents consider data quality as a corporate asset for decision-making, while 37% are not fully convinced of data quality’s organizational value
• 71% view data quality as very important to meeting compliance requirements, especially larger firms (84%), making compliance the main driver of data quality and data governance investments
• 92% feel that data quality will become an even bigger issue in the next five years due to the financial crisis
• 33% of those who report an enterprise view of internal data don’t trust that information
• Only 16% of respondents have access to key performance indicators (KPIs) in data-driven reports
• 56% of companies have processes in place to compare customer transactions against international watch lists and crime/terror databases

“The results we’ve seen are both encouraging and disappointing,” said Tony Fisher, president and CEO of DataFlux. “It’s refreshing to see the concept of data quality becoming ubiquitous, especially given the sector’s upheaval over the past year. At the same time, while many companies seem to have good intentions about planning a data governance program, it’s of no value until they put the practices in place. We are using the information from this survey to help financial services companies re-prioritize their greatest corporate asset – their data.”

DataFlux commissioned the study to gain insight into the data governance programs currently in place or in planning stages at North American financial services companies. Additional goals of the study were to demonstrate the level of confidence that both IT and business professionals have in the quality of their companies’ corporate data and understand data governance trends within the financial services community. A full report on the survey and its findings will soon be available at www.dataflux.com.

In addition to its industry-leading core data quality and integration platform, DataFlux also provides several solutions specifically designed to govern and manage the critical, ever-changing corporate data landscape of the financial services market. For example, DataFlux provides technologies to help the financial services organizations better understand their customers by identifying customers across the organization, understanding the relationships of customer households or corporate relationship and validating that current or potential customers are not on government watchlists of designated individuals that have been identified as known criminals or fraudsters.

The survey, conducted in May 2009, collected data from 296 respondents in the financial services industry. This sampling represented a cross-section of companies by size and of contacts by job titles, though the majority of respondents were IT directors, IT managers and database analysts.