When I speak (off-record) to a lot of finance companies they sit mostly in two camps:

a) Building for the long-term, they know regulations are only going to become the norm
b) Cobbling together the bare minimum on a wing and an (Excel) prayer

Clearly a) is the way to go. If a company gets through FSCS SCV, Solvency II, Basel II/III or whatever, there are only more directives coming down the line and there is a huge amount of similarity between the underlying data governance, data quality, workflows, reporting and technical infrastructure involved.

Ultimately the fines are only going to get bigger but all this is good news because I think without compliance data governance/data quality in the finance sector would still be a pipe dream for many of these firms.

Great post, keep them coming!

Great post, moving off the obvious business hassles for a moment, one technical limitation that I’ve seen hamper any effort to cut loose is the thorny issue of data migration.

In several finance and utilities companies the fear of migration has resulted in no-one wishing to take responsibility to move off the legacy stack. In one instance it took 5 years and multiple failures for them to simply give up and stick with what they already had.

The problem is that we’ve taken systems that were conceived as batch-oriented, overnight processors and integrated them into 24/7, zero downtime environments. Simply defining all the feeds for one ancient system took another company 3 years. With all this fear and confusion it’s little reason why some companies simply can’t find a sponsor to take the risk and move off the old stack. The failure rate is just so high.

Thought I would throw in one of my own tangents but I hope it adds to the debate!

When IT was introduced into organizations some 40 years ago, it was only perceived as the magic instrument going to facilitate “everything”. At that time, not enough people realized that IT itself would become a subject to modernization on a regular basis. When management got aware of
that necessity (and people got in charge that had an IT education), the development of information technology had already taken up a speed that most large organizations were not able to follow anymore.

As a result, organizations now have the burden of legacy systems. “Cutting loose” is an obvious obligation, but the budget related to it and the risk to underestimate the real cost (and may be fail) lets many organizations hesitate.

- Dylan

Jenna