Industry Benchmark Survey on Data Governance: From Captured Data to Control-Grade Evidence

Regulators expect firms to keep records and produce them on request, and recent US enforcement has penalised those that didn’t. The question is no longer whether firms capture surveillance and archive data. It’s whether they can prove what they ingested, how it changed and what surveillance followed.

Confidence and evidence are further apart than most assume. Our survey found that 75% of respondents rate their governance ‘Established’ or ‘Control-grade’, yet only 36% could show a regulator that trail within hours. The largest group (40%) expect days of manual assembly. And while 94% detect data quality breaks automatically, 64% fix them by hand.

Drawing on a survey of 200 compliance, risk, data and technology professionals across banks, buy-side firms, independent broker-dealers and commodity trading firms, this white paper explores five areas that decide whether surveillance and archive data would hold up as evidence:

• Confidence versus evidence: why 75% claim top-tier maturity, yet only 36% could answer a regulator’s data-specific question within hours.
• Lineage and the trade–comms link: 43% maintain full lineage for all key data flows, and only 45% say the identity link between trade and communications data is governed and automated.
• Machines catch the breaks, people fix them: 94% detect automatically, 64% fix manually, and only 35% resolve a material break within 24 hours.
• Ownership and the seams between systems: just 3% lack a clear owner of surveillance data quality, yet 49% say accountability breaks down at cross-system reconciliation.
• What leaders do and where investment is heading: the seven practices behind documented evidence, and why 79% expect governance investment to rise over the next 12–18 months.

The takeaway: confidence isn’t evidence. Regulators will ask for proof, and those who can produce it are more likely to have automated the fix, not just the detection. For firms still locating where their chain breaks, this survey report offers a benchmark map and a five-step self-test to run the regulator’s question on your own programme. Download it free of charge now.