The development of data governance strategies is being driven by regulation, but a smart strategy can deliver far more than regulatory compliance and give financial firms the ability to improve their customer relationships and increase profitability. With data governance at the top of the agenda at many banks, its challenges and opportunities will be discussed during a panel session at next week’s A-Team Group Data Management Summit in New York. Ahead of the event, we caught up with Brett Caracciolo, director of data governance and warehousing at Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi, who will be on the panel.
Caracciolo has led data governance at the bank for the past four years and won early executive approval to put together a governance programme, initially to meet regulatory requirements and later to benefit the bank’s business. He outlined a policy covering all the components of data governance, including the roles and responsibilities of colleagues within the bank, and continued to build out a roadmap and strategy.
He explains: “I started the governance programme about three-and-a-half years ago. It is based on five components: governance policy, data quality, data stewardship, data architecture and a metadata repository.”
About two years into the programme, the Bank of Tokyo acquired Union Bank and in July 2014, integration of the two began, advancing the cause of data governance through the selection of best-of-breed elements from each side of the integration. Caracciolo says: “We went from no data quality programme to one of the best on the street in a very short time. We set up a data quality management centre and cleansed 46,000 data quality anomalies from the customer data repository, which is good for the business.”
There is still more to do at the bank to improve data governance, but the emphasis has moved away from technical issues to focus on business needs. For example, an enterprise metadata repository that will expose metadata to the business is in progress, and Caracciolo and his team are looking at the bank’s data architecture and data warehouse with the aim of allowing the business to view data in the governance programme not just as a solution to regulatory issues, but as data that can help the bank increase profitability. Caracciolo concludes: “We are working to improve data access and understanding, and how data is consumed. We want to provide the business with good data quality and tools and resources to manipulate the data.”
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