Future Proofing your Data Strategy

Regulatory compliance has become a competitive differentiator with organisations that fail to implement adequate solutions suffering financial penalties that may render the business unprofitable or even unviable.

April 29th 2021 marked the second day of The A-Team’s Data Management Summit where Solidatus’ Co-CEO, Philip Dutton, joined a group of data experts on a panel titled: “Data strategy spotlight: Future proofing your data strategy for today’s complex regulatory environment.”

The focus of the panel was broad, covering a wide range of key issues businesses face in the ever-changing landscape of data management. Philip started by covering the core components of BCBS 239 and how the introduction of legislation like it marked a shift in how companies thought about their data.

“The sands that we sit on are shifting much quicker than they did in the past. Trying to create something sustainable that has a manageable cost is very, very difficult. I believe that as the banks have become more focussed on data management, they’re turning this from being reactive to an opportunity to get their house in order so they can compete better and remove the costs associated with regulation.”

Philip was quick to point out that, as a business community, we don’t need to view regulation as a burden, but rather an opportunity to grow and create new data management processes that ultimately will leave us all better off. There is also an opportunity to use mandatory spend to capture powerful data insights and in turn, save costs and produce profits.

“In terms of the regulation, one of the things that we’ve seen from clients is that there are so many regulations across so many regulators, that they’ve become a huge burden on the organisation just to fulfil that kind of obligation. So they prioritise which regulation to tackle, either by which regulator is banging on the door loudest or the one that has the biggest stick to wield. That’s not what regulation should be about. Regulation really is designed to encourage behaviour, which means that organisations should be trying to create better processes and better data management across the organisation.”

Regulators are also concerned with how data is collected. What can be automated and how we can create meaning from the results that are produced is paramount.

“Reports are great, but you’ve got different fields, meaning different things interpreted by different people; what we need is more of a standard, harmonised view of that data – so, they’re looking at how they can bring the data in, making this much more of an automated process, where machine-readable regulations mean that you can machine-interpret those regulations and implement those into the organisation. If we’re going to engineer data better, we actually have to engineer better; let’s look at each of the pieces of the puzzle and work out how we do the different steps better.”

Philip summed up an important point to close the panel’s discussion: approaching different regulations as unique pieces of legislation is wrong – they’re often very similar in structure and requirements.

“In a way, they all want the same thing. There’s a huge overlap – do one and then do the delta of the rest and therefore you’re not re-implementing the same thing repeatedly, you’re just doing deltas – this approach works for most regulations. Knowing your customer gives you a whole lot of benefits across the entirety of the organisation just from doing that one part of regulation.”

Solidatus allows organisations to proactively approach compliance by rapidly capturing, storing, and graphically representing data lineage, together with its supporting metadata. The power to document lineage at the attribute level, showing how data moves across the enterprise from capture to ultimate usage, means Solidatus reveals demonstrable data quality, inspiring confidence in regulators and inspectors.