Case Study: Strategic Data Review

Sector: Financial Services

Client: Under NDA

Model: Associate Partnership

Headquarters: West Yorkshire and UK-Wide

Operations: Headquarters and mobile workers

Headcount: Employed 100+ and 500+ associates

SYSC 13.7 is part of the FCA Handbook.

Background

A financial services company was experiencing significant issues in managing it's stored data and, with plans to grow through acquisition, was looking at managing data files as minimal human intervention as possible and be able to merge other data sets into the business seamlessly.

What We Did

We undertook a data review of data not stored in enterprise applications (e.g., CRM) and quickly identified there was also no clear data management policy whereby a data taxonomy and ownership were clearly defined and managed accordingly.

Whilst it would be possible to overcome the issues identified, the scale was insurmountable.  We therefore proposed investing in appropriate third party software that would deal with the existing data issues, continue to manage data to the required standards and be able to integrate the data of acquisitions into the business.

What We Delivered

We worked closely with IT and business stakeholders to achieve buy-in to the new ways of working and explain what we were looking to achieve end to end.  This broke down political and operational barriers successfully.

Various solutions for data management were identified, which we reviewed appropriately and made recommendations on the preferred solution, assisting the IT Director with an appropriate ROI business case.

Specialist support on developing a data taxonomy was also provided, ensuring that the business could design, manage and operate appropriately in the future.

What Happened

As confidence in the existing IT team grew, we were able to recommend to the board we take a reduced lead and simply provide oversight.

A data taxonomy was designed, the selected solution implemented and around 15TB of data comprising mainly PDF files were able to managed against business and regulatory requirements.  The solution removed completely the non-management of data files.