About a-team Marketing Services
The knowledge platform for the financial technology industry
The knowledge platform for the financial technology industry

A-Team Insight Blogs

Opinion: Why the Client On-Boarding Conundrum Will Fuel Master Data Management (MDM) in Capital Markets

Subscribe to our newsletter

Neill Vanlint, Managing Director of EMEA and Asia for GoldenSource, explains how MDM can provide answers to the client on-boarding challenge facing financial institutions.

Taking one step forward and two steps back – that’s what it must feel like for financial institutions at the moment. You could be forgiven for thinking that finding a solution to manage all reference, counterparty, client and customer data in one place ticks all the compliance boxes. But regulators show no sign of taking their foot off the accelerator. When a new client signs up, institutions immediately have to define exactly what product they are selling and to whom.

This is no easy task and as more counterparties and clients sign up, the challenge facing banks is around keeping track of who’s who and what’s what. These days, it is simply too risky not to verify each stage of the client on-boarding process.

Take the initial handling of a new customer, or on-boarding as it’s better known. This involves those all-important KYC checks for sanctions and conflicts of interest. All well and good, but what if the institution in question is doing business with a firm in Luxembourg, whose parent company is based in Libya, for example? This is all about understanding how an organisation’s corporate hierarchy operates – vital in light of controversies around offshore havens. An institution then needs to look at what products have been authorised to trade. The scenario could arise where someone only trades Fixed Income derivatives, for example. Or it may well be that an institution only authorises select people to trade a certain product or volume of currencies or bonds. As if that wasn’t enough, there is the small matter of deciding which clearing house to use and who to settle trades with. Relying on manual intervention only to manage these events will trigger errors and attract the gaze of the regulator.

What’s needed is a workflow that fits around the entity master to validate each stage and also the ability to map products to customers and counterparties. This is what the corporate world calls master data management (MDM) – which fully automates and strings together these critical processes and establishes relationships. By definition, MDM involves the processes, governance, architecture and standards required to source, cleanse and centralise data to provide a single view of the business – including new customers. However, capital markets has unique relationships, such as that of counterparty. This challenges the corporate world’s approach to MDM and it’s these idiosyncrasies that require a different solution for capital markets – one which needs to be future proofed for flexibility.

No financial institution in its right mind wants to keep re-tooling their existing solution as soon as a new regulation comes into play or, more importantly, as new KYC services become available. Flexibility to on-board new KYC services or utilities is also important and having a system that can fully leverage these capabilities to handle the regulatory obligations of the future has never been more important. By integrating the on-boarding process with MDM-style data management, firms can conduct efficient compliance refreshes based on customer data changing over time and reap huge business benefits. With this in place, financial institutions can confidently take a step forward and look for upsell and cross-sell opportunities, instead of taking another step back to evaluate a new customer’s compliance credentials.

Subscribe to our newsletter

Related content

WEBINAR

Upcoming Webinar: Unlocking value: Harnessing modern data platforms for data integration, advanced investment analytics, visualisation and reporting

4 September 2025 10:00am ET | 3:00pm London | 4:00pm CET Duration: 50 Minutes Modern data platforms are bringing efficiencies, scalability and powerful new capabilities to institutions and their data pipelines. They are enabling the use of new automation and analytical technologies that are also helping firms to derive more value from their data and...

BLOG

The Data Backbone of Defence: Powering Next Generation Surveillance

A unified data fabric is fast becoming wholesale finance’s front line of defence. By fusing millions of voice calls, chat messages and trade records into a single analytical view, next generation surveillance promises to detect misconduct in minutes and to satisfy regulators who increasingly ask firms to prove that capability. A-Team Group RegTech Summits in...

EVENT

TradingTech Briefing New York

Our TradingTech Briefing in New York is aimed at senior-level decision makers in trading technology, electronic execution, trading architecture and offers a day packed with insight from practitioners and from innovative suppliers happy to share their experiences in dealing with the enterprise challenges facing our marketplace.

GUIDE

AI in Capital Markets: Practical Insight for a Transforming Industry – Free Handbook

AI is no longer on the horizon – it’s embedded in the infrastructure of modern capital markets. But separating real impact from inflated promises requires a grounded, practical understanding. The AI in Capital Markets Handbook 2025 provides exactly that. Designed for data-driven professionals across the trade life-cycle, compliance, infrastructure, and strategy, this handbook goes beyond...