FS companies: Who's looking after your data?

A number of financial services companies still have no one in charge of data compliance strategies or have entrusted them to the wrong teams, research has found.

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The survey of IT decision makers at large financial services companies revealed a degree of confusion in the industry over data handling. Eighteen per cent of respondents said they either didn't check potential customers against criminal lists, or didn't know whether such checks took place even though existing regulation requires it.

The survey by research company BDRC and data integration company Dataflux also found 16 per cent said no one in their organisation had a specific responsibility for making data processes transparent and auditable in line with current financial services regulations.

In addition, 36 per cent said responsibility of data quality was given to the IT department - a wrong move, according to BDRC and Dataflux. The research says data quality, in terms of where information resides and who has access to it, is critical to business strategy and so should be championed by business managers in the organisation.

Mark Long, business proposition manager at BDRC, said: "How can you know who you are lending to if you don't have a single view of the customer within the organisation? Developing new products is going to be problematic without the sort of customer segmentation that you can only get with high quality data on your customers."

Nonetheless, 89 per cent of respondents said data was a strategic asset to their company.