By Preya Patel, managing director at Raw Knowledge
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 vital interest to everyone involved in wealth management.
Unquestionably, data that’s accurate, accessible, consistent, timely and well governed is a business-wide issue today, and is critical for successful performance. Good clean robust data is essential for running investment portfolios, tracking performance, managing risk, personalising reporting to demanding clients, responding to regulatory requests, and supplying actionable management information to oversight committees.
At root, the best use of client and business data supports efficiency, growth and competitive differentiation. More specifically, this improves all-important client outcomes while resolving increasing operational and regulatory demands.
As a result of this sharpened focus, research we commissioned shows that business leaders at some firms are now heavily engaged in driving initiatives designed to inspire the entire team to accept and share accountability for data quality and use. This is because everybody in a wealth management firm interacts with data to a major or lesser extent, which makes it everyone’s business it’s used well.
However, alongside the growing consensus that data ownership needs to be embedded across the organisation, some sizeable obstacles are getting in the way. These blockers are familiar at many firms.
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 confusion and myopia on top of perilous inaccuracies.
Basically, everyone just doing their own thing when completing their tasks amid this status quo is adding to 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 taking a look at what some firms have been doing to escape this conundrum, leading the way in the sector with their push to achieve enhanced data management.
In our Order from disorder study, qualitative interviews were conducted with executives at 12 mid-tier UK wealth firms during Q1 2026. We found they may be pursuing different approaches, but all report they are transforming from siloed data to 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 great use of 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 sought-after boosted productivity and time savings.
- Resourcing data transformation is a real problem: the smaller the firm, the bigger the issue, 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 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 road littered with potential potholes for a preoccupied in-house team.
Technically speaking, the right solution should be ‘low-code’ or even ‘no-code’. 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 environment in wealth management is attainable, with clear business aims and a helping hand from experienced solution experts.
