The ability to trace the journey of data from its origin to its final report is no longer a luxury but a regulatory and operational necessity. As firms grapple with the intensifying requirements of regulations such as BCBS 239, GDPR and the shifting landscape of MiFID II, the “black box” approach to data management has become a liability. The challenge for financial institutions is not just the sheer volume of data, but the “data debt” accumulated through fragmented legacy systems, complex ETL processes, and manual reconciliations that obscure the truth. This list is taken from our advisory board’s shortlist of nominees and votes for the DMI Awards Europe 2025 award for Best Data Lineage Solution. This article profiles leading vendors offering innovative solutions that address these critical challenges for capital markets professionals (Chief Data Officer, Data Architect, Regulatory Compliance Officer).
Winner, DMI Awards Europe 2025: Best Data Lineage Solution
Informatica’s end-to-end data management platform includes data lineage capabilities across its Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC), which can scan, parse and map lineage across a wide array of heterogeneous data sources, from legacy mainframes to modern cloud applications and data lakes. Its AI-powered CLAIRE engine automates much of the discovery and mapping process. The product is aimed at helping financial institutions simplify complex and sprawling data landscapes, offering visibility into data transformations to ensure regulatory compliance and operational efficiency.Ab Initio provides an enterprise data platform that manages large-scale data processing, integration, and metadata-driven governance. Its “from first principles” approach allows it to provide native, “true” lineage by capturing transformation logic directly from its own parallel processing engine, while also “stitching” together lineage from external third-party systems. The product enables Tier-1 banks to handle massive volumes of complex data while providing end-to-end traceability that satisfies the most rigorous BCBS 239 audit requirements, closing the gap between technical execution and business oversight.
An enterprise data intelligence platform that combines a data catalogue with collaborative data lineage features comprises Alation’s offering. Its “behavioural intelligence” engine uses machine learning to understand how data is used, generating a more accurate and business-friendly lineage intended to bridge the gap between technical data flows and business context. Financial institutions can foster a data-driven culture by making data lineage accessible and understandable to business users, enhancing trust and accelerating decision-making by clarifying data origins and transformations.
Aquata by Arcesium
Aquata provides a specialised data management and reporting solution including comprehensive data lineage for investment data. Its integration with front-to-back office workflows and financial data models allows for granular, industry-specific lineage, particularly for portfolio and risk data within alternative asset management. Aquata seeks to aid capital market firms, especially hedge funds and asset managers, ensure the accuracy and auditability of their complex investment data, reducing operational risk in financial reporting and regulatory submissions.Atlan offers an active metadata platform that unifies data governance, data catalogue and data lineage functionalities. Its “active lineage” is interactive, propagating metadata tags, such as PII or sensitive data indicators), across the entire data journey, providing context and enabling proactive governance actions. Static data lineage becomes a dynamic operational tool in this product, helping financial institutions maintain continuous compliance and accelerate data-project delivery by providing always-on visibility into data trust and quality.
Collibra offers an enterprise data governance platform with capabilities for data cataloguing, data quality and end-to-end data lineage. It features a comprehensive approach to data governance, treating lineage as an integral part of a broader framework that supports policy enforcement, data stewardship, and business glossary integration. Large, highly regulated financial institutions can be assisted in establishing a single source of truth for their data, ensuring adherence to complex regulatory requirements and improving data literacy across the organisation.
This data virtualisation platform integrates data from disparate sources, creating a unified view while maintaining data lineage. It focuses on creating a “logical data warehouse” layer, where lineage is captured as data, is virtualised and transformed without physical data movement. Financial institutions can streamline data access and integration for analytics and reporting, providing clear lineage within a virtualised environment to reduce the complexity and cost of traditional ETL processes.
The automated data lineage platform created by Manta, part of IBM, automatically scans, maps and visualises data flows across various technologies. The universal native scanner technology automatically discovers and visualises complex code-level lineage, including stored procedures, ETL jobs and reporting layers, creating a comprehensive “live map” of the data pipeline. Manta provides capital markets firms with an understanding of their technical data landscape, reducing the manual effort and errors associated with impact analysis, migration planning and root cause identification.
Meta Integration Technology’s (MITI) vendor-agnostic metadata management platform is designed to unify documentation across complex, multi-vendor environments. As the “Switzerland of Metadata,” it provides deep connectivity to virtually every major BI, ETL and database tool, allowing for “stitched” end-to-end lineage across mixed technology stacks. MetaKarta addresses the fragmentation of lineage across different vendor “islands,” providing a central cockpit for architects to see the full data story regardless of which underlying tools are being used.
Octopai provides an automated data intelligence platform focused on metadata management and end-to-end data lineage. Its “scanner-first” approach offers automation in discovering and mapping lineage across a wide array of BI tools, ETL platforms and databases. Through this, financial institutions can quickly and accurately understand their data ecosystems, accelerating impact analysis for changes, speeding up root-cause identification for data errors and ensuring data governance compliance without extensive manual effort.
This AI-powered data lineage and governance platform is designed to automate metadata discovery and mapping using patented knowledge graph technology that automatically stitches together fragmented metadata from diverse enterprise systems into a cohesive, interactive view, providing full data transparency from source to consumption. Orion Governance aims to help financial institutions eliminate data blind spots and reduce manual metadata management, providing automated, end-to-end lineage that ensures data trust and facilitates regulatory compliance and data modernisation initiatives.
Solidatus provides a dynamic data lineage and modelling platform, focusing on comprehensive visualisation and active metadata management. Its intuitive graphical interface allows users to build, visualise and interact with complex data lineage models in real-time, facilitating collaborative data governance and rapid change impact assessment. The product enables capital market firms to manage and understand their data ecosystems with clarity, improving data quality, reducing regulatory risk and enhancing operational efficiency through superior data visualisation.
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