Modern Data Landscape Comes Under Scrutiny at Data Management Summit London

From data products and marketplaces to the new challenges of regulatory compliance and the latest thinking on unstructured data, A-Team Group’s Data Management Summit London 2025 took in the full breadth of topics that chief data officers and their teams are dealing with daily.

With a line up of C-suite executives and expert speakers from all corners of the data ecosystem, the full-day summit of fireside chats, panel discussions and keynote addresses shone an authoritative light on today’s global data management industry.

Key themes addressed across the sessions also included how organisations can get the best out of artificial intelligence, how they can implement a modern data architecture and how they can optimise their governance structures to meet the ever-growing demands made on data systems.

Unstructured Data

A hot topic at Data Management Summit London 2025 was the use of and management of unstructured data, which is estimated to very soon account for about 80 per cent of all data on financial institutions’ systems.

With half of respondents to an in-session poll of summit attendees saying they were just setting out, or were in the early stages of, managing and governing the data type, it was apparent that the challenges associated with wrangling such data sets are weighing on companies.

The panel discussion on managing and governing unstructured and alternative data noted the complexity of the data, the difficulty of parsing its linguistic structure into structured formats, the scarcity of metadata and the difficulty of existing governance frameworks to accommodate it.

Nevertheless, the panellists comprising Paul Lickman, Group Head of Data Architecture at HSBC, Pablo Kotey, Head of Data Enablement at Schroders and Theo Bell, Head of AI Product at Rimes, agreed that harnessing structured data is crucial for making better-informed decisions and deriving deep analytical insights.

Data Accessibility

Data marketplaces are presenting financial institutions with a vehicle for the effective accessibility to and distribution of data products within their organisations, enabling the full utilisation of the information they have in innovative ways.

During the panel discussion that dwelt on practical approaches to setting up data marketplaces and data products – and which asked if they open the path to data democratisation – speakers likened data marketplaces to online shopping sites. Institutions’ data users can browse and test the datasets, tools and other data-based innovations showcased on marketplaces and then deploy those that suit their workflows.

In a poll, summit delegates supported the largely positive comments of the panellists, which comprised Joanne Biggadike, Head of Data Governance at Schroders, Lynn Watts, Head of Data Management and Governance at Royal London Asset Management and Nikos Balanis, Head of Data Platform at CFC Insurance.

Improved user adoption was cited at the most critical success factor for a data marketplace by more than half of respondents.

Nevertheless, two-fifths said their organisations felt the implementation of marketplaces was constrained by the technology build-out needed to accommodate them. A third of respondents said that the cultural shift required to use such structures was proving difficult to overcome.

Panellists expressed sympathy with those sentiments, though it was observed that organisations would face different challenges according to their level of organisational maturity. Suitable data governance structures were also important to ensure the products complied with regulations and licences, and to vouchsafe the quality of the data products.

It was critical to the success of data products that they are carefully calibrated to meet needs within the organisation, the panel heard. That would entice more users to such marketplaces and help overcome cultural impediments to rolling out such facilities.

Streamlined Management

The rapid surge in data integration afforded institutions by the adoption of new technological tools has increased pressure on their data management and governance structures. The streamlining of those data architectures is gaining ground as a solution to mining optimal value from that data, the panel entitled “How to simplify and modernise data architecture to unleash data value and innovation”, was told.

Such simplified approaches can increase operational efficiency by reducing task implementation times, increasing processing speeds and boosting organisations’ ability to respond to business needs with greater agility, the panel heard.

It can also reduce maintenance costs and data management complexity, while improving data quality and metadata management, at the same time as providing faster access to data and boosting data accessibility.

Nevertheless, the panellists – Duncan Cooper, Chief Data Officer at Northern Trust,

Amit Nandi, VP Solutions and Data Architect at Barclays Corporate and Investment Bank, and Eva Dutton, Data Architect at St James Place, cautioned that there are implementation challenges.

Chief among them, they agreed in unison with a poll on the question, is the suitability of organisations’ legacy systems and the infrastructural debt they carry.

Almost half of respondents in the poll cited this as their chief hurdle in implementing a modern data architecture. Fragmented data setups and the difficulties they pose to connecting disparate data sources was a pain-point for just over a quarter of respondents.

Panellists commented that the exponential growth of data into organisations’ systems meant that the regularly update of their data stacks was critical. As well, it was noted that legacy systems are not just infrastructural in nature – ingrained organisational approaches to data management could also inhibit the adoption of newer data management practices.

Recognising the need to change as an opportunity to bring new efficiencies, the panel said that continuous iterative updates to systems were a more efficient means of absorbing new architectures.

Satisfying the Overseers

Regulatory reporting has become increasingly data-focussed in the past decade as market overseers have also recognised the power of modern digital capabilities and upgraded their systems accordingly. That’s required reporting institutions to revamp their infrastructure in lock-step.

When optimised for regulatory reporting, data management strategies can ensure the necessary compliance data is easily accessible, can recognise and utilise industry-standard asset and entity identifiers and automate reporting processes.

However, achieving this isn’t easy, as the panellists in the discussion entitled “Managing the regulatory reporting new normal – the data management response” reflected.

Consistent and high-quality data is essential to meeting the reporting demands of regulators but this is a challenge to organisations as the amount of data they utilise swells. As well, the panel said, the increasing complexity and rapid evolution of regulations is a compliance hurdle, especially for organisations with creaking legacy infrastructures. Automating these processes can also be expensive and difficult to implement.

Unsurprisingly, these three factors were the most commonly cited challenges in a poll of summit attendees.

The panel concluded that key solutions to addressing these pain points could be found in soliciting board-room support for long-term investment in iterative development of suitable data management infrastructure and consultation with regulators to better understand their reporting requirements. Further, organisations would benefit from collaborative efforts to overcome common challenges and lobby for standardised reporting practices.

• A-Team Group AI in Capital Markets Summit London 2025 will be held on May 22. To see the full agenda, click here or register below.