Challenge
GETTING RELIABLE INFORMATION ON THE EXISTING DATA
Financial service firms are under considerable regulatory pressure to keep their data in order. Systemically important banks need to comply with the BCBS 239 regulation, published in January 2013, to strengthen risk data aggregation capabilities and internal risk reporting practices. Compliance with the harmonized EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is mandatory for them starting 25 May 2018, as is the case for any other organization processing data of EU residents.
The need to sustain compliance with these new regulations and to ward off the substantive noncompliance fines, created the momentum for our client to launch a data governance program and set up a department dedicated to managing data throughout the entire organization. The primary challenge faced by this new unit was to identify and deploy the technologies needed to structure and document existing data and to keep that inventory up to date.
Approach
WORKING IN ENTREPRENEURIAL-SPIRITED TEAMS TO IMPLEMENT A DATA COMMUNICATION BACKBONE
We opted for a twofold approach to support our client in resolving this challenge. Starting from what is minimally required to sustain compliance with the BCBS 239 and GDPR regulations, we identified the Collibra technology needed to build an adequate solution. But secondly, we also started to explore how to maximize the return on the substantial investment in Collibra data governance technology.
By working closely with our client’s Data Governance and Quality Department and with an external partner specialized in Compliance and Regulatory Affairs, we put our specialist knowledge on data governance technology into practice to translate both our client’s needs and the regulators’ requirements into a future proof Collibra implementation.
Thriving on the entrepreneurial spirit in the newly established data department, we encouraged our client to take a hands-on approach. Implementing data governance practices is a continuous work. While validation obviously remains essential, implementing “the best as we know today” solution and continuing to improve is vital to delivering results in time.
With over 400,000 reports produced on a yearly basis, traceability of these reports and the related data was an essential issue for our client given the need for regulatory compliance. Using Collibra, a data communication platform including a data help desk and featuring workflows to manage data across the enterprise, we built a solution that enables our client to capture traceability. That could be achieved by linking our client’s data sources, business applications, data quality tools, metadata, reference data and data policies into a single system – putting in place the backbone of an active data governance approach.
Impact
USING DATA AS A STRATEGIC ASSET
By building a platform that documents the traceability of data and reports, we helped our client establish data governance processes and controls to sustain compliance with BCBS 239 and GDPR regulations. While that helps to ward off substantial fines, the benefits go far beyond the scope of regulatory compliance.
The platform that we implemented made it significantly easier for our client to access their massive amount of data and reports, and delivered increased confidence and trust in lineage and quality of the data. That not only enables a better and more efficient use of these data, it also facilitates a quality assessment of the numerous reports and business applications that have been deployed over time. The result of that? It becomes easier to manage reports and applications, to understand the impact if any of these need to be replaced, and to save on maintenance costs.