Data governance: The key to regulatory compliance

How data governance help businesses meet regulatory demands, improve reporting, and reduce risk

This blog explores the key challenges regulated organisations face, from data silos and quality issues to the burden of reporting and constant process changes. It highlights how effective data governance, supported by tools like data catalogs, quality monitoring, and process orchestration, can significantly enhance both compliance and operational efficiency.

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Why is data governance for regulation important?

Firms are under increased scrutiny from regulators to ensure business practices align with obligations and deliver fair outcomes for customers. This scrutiny aims to maintain market integrity, protect consumer interests, and ensure financial stability. Consequently, firms must be vigilant in their compliance efforts, regularly reviewing and updating practices to meet evolving regulatory expectations, including anticipating new developments.

Regulations require adherence to policies, rules, and standards set by various bodies, covering areas like data protection, financial reporting, anti-money laundering, and consumer protection. Each regulatory requirement imposes specific obligations on firms, necessitating a comprehensive approach to compliance. Accurate and timely data is fundamental, enabling firms to generate necessary reports, conduct audits, and provide evidence of compliance to regulators.

Effective data governance involves establishing clear policies and procedures for data management, ensuring data is consistently and accurately captured, stored, and maintained. It also requires assigning ownership and accountability for data, implementing robust data quality controls, and regularly auditing data processes to identify and address any issues. By maintaining high standards of data governance, firms can meet regulatory requirements and enhance operational efficiency and decision-making.

5 challenges faced by regulated businesses

1. Data sourcing & availability

Data is often siloed within a business and access to the right data at the right time for the intended purpose can be challenging. In some cases regulation will require new or more granular data to be captured, combined and made available and so a business’ ability to manage this effectively requires strict management and agility.

2. Data quality

If data timeliness, accuracy & completeness is of a poor standard this will affect any downstream process where this is being used and will produce inaccurate outputs. This leads to false information being presented and an inability to accurately report.

3. Reporting burden

Setting up a new process or regular reporting can be a massive burden on a business with many steps involved to source, combine, analyse and schedule. It requires specific resource and can have cost implications to deliver the report.

4. Regulatory scrutiny

The regulators are continually monitoring firms’ adherence to the rules set and so the need to demonstrate adherence and have auditable reporting internally and externally is an ongoing challenge .

5. Process changes

Where a new regulation is implemented this will often increase the workload of a business with requirements to store more data and potentially change business processes. This will lead to requirements for staff training, further compliance tasks and more data to manage.

How can data governance help?

Data catalog

A data catalog holds the metadata that describes where a business’ data resides, what the data is, along with data ownership and lineage.

This allows businesses to have a holistic view for all staff of their data estate which can be accessed to answer any questions about the data and provide data practitioners the ability to use the data more effectively.

Data quality identification & monitoring

Analysing the data and understanding its quality allows a business to understand where they have gaps and where effort should be made to correct and improve.

Implementing strict monitoring and validation steps will help to improve and maintain good quality data and define single source-of-truths.

Orchestration & scheduling

Having a holistic view of data via the catalog and access to the lineage of data sources and systems helps to efficiently set up new uses of the data.

It also provides the information required to use the data in a controlled and informed way.

Process management

By recording processes and having strict management of these and the data that feeds in, a business gains oversight and can manage these processes more effectively.

Maintaining this descriptive view helps to be sure that processes are working effectively and any changes that may affect them can be checked in the system and updates made to ensure they continue to work.

Spotlight on Aperture

Aperture Data Studio is a data intelligence platform that combines data quality and governance capabilities to help organisations achieve trusted and fit for purpose data. Built on strong data quality and enrichment capabilities, the latest version of Aperture Data Studio introduces a data catalog and governance module to the platform, allowing users to not only improve their data, but to visualise, understand and gain oversight of it too.

The ability to connect to multiple data sources and automate data import, transformation and export whilst monitoring quality enables users to effectively manage their data in a controlled and efficient manner.

Aperture Data Studio provides full governed oversight of the data, processes and owners required for maintaining regulatory compliance and reporting.

Aperture Data Studio