Once considered a back-office technical function sitting with an organisation’s IT or operations team, data management has now taken centre stage as a core business asset of critical interest to everyone involved in wealth management.
Data that’s accurate, accessible, consistent, timely and well governed is now unquestionably a business-wide issue. Good clean robust data is vital for running investment portfolios, tracking performance, managing risk, personalising reporting to clients, responding to regulatory requests, and supplying actionable management information to oversight committees.
The best use of client and business data supports efficiency, growth and competitive differentiation. More specifically, it improves all-important client outcomes while resolving increasing operational and regulatory demands.
Research we commissioned shows that business leaders, because of this sharpened focus on data, are now heavily engaged in driving initiatives designed to inspire the entire team to accept and share accountability for data quality and use. There’s now a recognition that, as everybody in a wealth management firm interacts with data to a major or lesser extent, it’s everyone’s business that it’s used well.
However, some sizeable obstacles are getting in the way of data ownership being properly embedded across an organisation. These blockers will be familiar at many firms.
For example, data is still often held in different unconnected silos. Staff are often working with outmoded processes in fragmented legacy systems because there is no alternative. Updated data in one system needs to be manually carried across to other systems error-free; failing to do so compromises the validity of client and regulatory reporting. What’s more, ineffective governance of how data is handled piles short-sightedness and confusion on top of potentially perilous inaccuracies.
Basically, with this status quo, everyone just doing their own thing when completing their tasks adds costly inefficiency on a grand scale.
It’s not surprising that, in these circumstances, it can feel incredibly difficult to consolidate and standardise data. The effort to do so can seem so great that this issue languishes lower down the list of business priorities – even as tighter margins and the need to maximise efficiency demand urgent action.
Rising right up the agenda
It’s worth looking at what some firms have been doing to escape this conundrum, leading the way in the sector with their push to achieve better governed and better harmonised data.
In our ‘Order from disorder’ study, qualitative interviews were conducted with executives at 12 mid-tier UK wealth firms during Q1 2026. We found that while firms may be pursuing different approaches, all report that they are seeking to transform their siloed data into an integrated single source of truth – with the goal of achieving not just good, but excellent data.
Our key findings are:
- There is exponential potential for business growth and enhanced client relationships through the use of high-quality data, with improved efficiency creating opportunities to cut costs and achieve scale.
- Creating a data strategy is just the start; implementing it to achieve that one source of truth takes hard work and persistence.
- A data strategy will fail if it doesn’t bring people with it; everyone from the board down must buy into the journey, with data champions signalling the achievable benefits.
- Enhanced data quality is imperative to maximising AI as a route to highly sought-after productivity boosts and time savings.
- Resourcing data transformation is a real problem: the smaller the firm, the bigger the issue and the harder the internal ask.
Learnings to stimulate positive action
For small to mid-sized firms, the lesson to be learned from our research is that it’s crucial to work with a trusted tech partner, skilled in facilitating a data management solution that aims for excellence, not just ‘good’. The alternative DIY route to better data management can be a rocky and possibly costlier road, littered with potential potholes for a preoccupied in-house team.
Technically speaking, the right solution should be built on ‘low-code’ or even ‘no-code’ architecture. When translated into business benefit, this simply means data management isn’t the preserve of specialists or a technical team. Instead, everyone in the firm can easily engage with the data management technology as part of their day-to-day role. Responsibility is shared as the best use of invaluable high-quality data expands in parallel with business growth.
Data management fit for today’s challenging operational, technological and regulatory environment in wealth management is attainable, with clear business aims and a helping hand from experienced solution experts.
Written by Preya Patel, Managing Director of Raw Knowledge Ltd.
