Why the financial services sector is taking a new approach to ensuring data quality

While the critical importance of data quality is universally understood in financial services, the methods for achieving and maintaining it are evolving. Recent research suggests that a strategy termed “data quality democratisation” may be the key to helping companies cost-effectively maintain better quality data across their operations.

Access to good data is foundational to decisions and processes within financial services. Beyond ensuring compliance, and thereby preventing potential fines and reputational damage, high quality data is the essential key to safe growth.

Today’s customers are increasingly demanding real-time services, personalised features, and a superior customer experience. Meeting these expectations is only possible when you have accurate, recent, and actionable data at your disposal.

So what is data quality democratisation?

In short, data quality democratisation means enabling more people within the organisation to contribute to the challenge of improving data quality. This shift is particularly important to financial services, where accurate client data is mission critical. Poor data quality can directly impact regulatory compliance, financial accuracy, customer trust and ultimately business performance.

Instead of treating data quality as a technical problem for IT to solve in isolation, democratisation makes high-quality data accessible to more people across the business. From product managers and risk teams to customer service leads, it empowers those who actually use the data to drive the business forward. The result? Fewer bottlenecks, faster decisions, and more confident business outcomes.

How to democratise data quality

Data quality improvements in financial services are moving from reactive data cleaning toward proactive, enterprise-wide data governance that supports automation, advanced analytics, compliance, and ultimately, growth.

Responsibility for data quality often falls between the gaps – with only 1 in 4 organisations having clarity on data ownership. However, by strategically employing the right tools, technologies and governance strategies, financial services companies can implement robust data strategies, shifting data quality from being a heavy burden for the few to a valuable business opportunity for the organisation.

More details can be found in our whitepaper: “Why data quality is being democratised – and how it is driving business success”. Read it now to find out: