Rather than relying on data from external sources, firms should instead aim to create it from source documents, said Stuart Grant, EMEA business development director for financial services at risk management solution vendor Sybase, during this afternoon’s keynote speech. Speaking to attendees at A-Team Group’s Data Management for Risk, Analytics and Valuations conference in London, Grant explained that the industry could benefit from a degree of innovation in the data creation process in order to take that responsibility out of the hands of third party providers.
As well as pulling together data from source documents such as issuer documents, firms should also be focused on producing clean, usable metadata in order to better monitor their data quality and operational efficiency. All of this can then be used by downstream systems and centralised enterprise architectures for analytics and dashboarding purposes and in order to get a better handle on operational risk.
In such an intense regulatory environment, where scrutiny of data sets is much more commonplace, firms can be more proactive in their approach to managing risk in this manner. Of course, this is only one aspect of risk management and Grant had plenty to say on the subject of big data and cloud-based approaches (more on which later), but the focus on data proactivity is certainly one way of setting a firm apart in terms of competitive advantage.
