Financial Services Organization Selects Precisely for Investment Initiative

This Fortune 100 mutual life insurance company has partnered with Precisely since 1990 to assure the quality of their critical business data. Precisely solutions span a vast array of systems and processes to validate the integrity of data required for key business operations such as performance accounting and revenue recognition.

In 2014, they built a new, state-of-the art investment data hub. The CDO proactively implemented Precisely solutions to achieve quality data that could be trusted from incoming sources like custodial banks, third party vendors and on-line asset managers that fed their deal allocator system, new investment accounting system, data warehouse and ultimately, their general ledger. In parallel with the implementation of the services organization realized that to maximize performance and value of this new asset, data governance would be a key requirement for the organization moving forward.

The CDO began an aggressive plan to internally implement governance processes across the organization. Pertinent glossaries that would document metadata, data owners/stewards, data definitions and policies through spreadsheets were initiated. A significant need was understanding data lineage for their systems at a business level. This was also managed in a spreadsheet tool integrated with their CRM (Salesforce).

Despite this pro-active approach, the customer still lacked automation, adoption and sustainability of their governance program across both business and technical user groups because of the following challenges:

• Data sets included complexities like transformations and aggregations, and derived formulas that challenged simple governance strategies
• Technical data lineage was not practical for business teams and influencers to leverage easily, nor was it readily understood
• Updates, permission rights around usage, and approvals lacked visibility and accountability across the various siloes and users
• Technical metadata files from key applications needed to be imported manually or required the development of custom code solutions
• Data licensing policies for third party providers like Bloomberg and Thomson and Reuters, in particular, was difficult to understand and manage

Read more about how this mutual life insurance company automated technical metadata files to update Cognos, Informatica, Oracle and other core applications reducing the need for manual or coding resources.