Technology has transformed all aspects of the financial services industry and continues to be a key driver of innovation. From redefining current business roles, evolving operating processes and maturing employee skills, technology has enabled faster, more accurate, and more creative ways to do business.

Among its impacts is helping to address the diverse needs of the front, middle, and back office, considering operational systems, people, and processes holistically. As more companies adopt more sophisticated technological tools to manage their operational responsibilities — serve client needs, satisfy regulators, perform with efficiency, and compete effectively — the bar has been raised for what, when, and how financial services can deliver.

Challenges of traditional reporting solutions

Not having a robust data management strategy designed to achieve a single source of truth will make it very difficult to have accurate analytics and reports. Many companies’ reporting solutions rely on data that is provided by external partners or service-provider systems. These are templated files designed by the third-party to serve all of a company’s reporting needs: portfolio holdings, key performance metrics, risk attributes, and so on. Not only does this make companies dependent on external partners to provide the best framework for reporting, it constrains what is reported, how data is presented, and therefore how it is analyzed. To modify them — say, add a new source of data — may require a time-consuming tech or developer adjustment.

While using business intelligence tools may provide greater flexibility, they are not designed to provide out-of-the-box reports that are picture perfect and presentation worthy. In addition, these tools are industry-agnostic not reporting solutions, so they will require extra work to produce the high-quality product necessary for client reporting. Nor can these tools easily connect data from multiple systems and perform analysis of that integrated dataset.

Financial services working with function-specific data repositories like these that do not speak to one another may similarly discover mismatches in their reports. It’s possible that different reports for different purposes do not align for particular datapoints as they are pulling from different sources.