One thing’s for sure, you’re only as good as the data you hold in your business. Rubbish in, rubbish out is the overused phrase, but it is so true when it comes to this digital age retail investment advisers now find themselves.
The FCA acting chief economist, Robin Finer, in a speech earlier this year, focused on the relationship between consumers, regulators and data – and how this might evolve. In his speech Finer points out that data is everywhere; ‘in our homes, in the news, on our wrists and in our pockets’.
This obviously raises questions as to how the regulator should tackle issues around data and how firms should respond and harvest high quality data and use this to streamline business, offer clients high value and ensure a sustainable professional practice.
Regulation and data When it comes to regulation, there are three key issues to think about when it comes to the value and role of data:
- The ways in which our data may create economic value for consumers
- The emotional value we place on data, and how this affects our willingness to share it with others
- The implications for companies who use our personal data for commercial gain
Policymakers and regulators need to understand all three of these areas fully in order to create robust policies.
Your business and data When it comes to business use there are a number of strategies that should be implemented:
- The first issue should always be to ensure your client data is of the highest quality and up to date. With the increase use for client portals firms cannot afford to have misspelt, missing or duplicated client records.
- Transparency for data collection needs focus. You may remember the General data Protection Regulation (GDPR)and all that entailed last year? Well ensure informed consent for data collection is crucial and knowing the basis for processing your client’s personal data is paramount.
- Once you are confident your client data is high quality and managed compliantly, you can then use the data to help streamline your business services plus comply with key rules and save time and costs. This can help with:
- Product Governance requirements and ensuring you clients are segmented using ‘behavioural data’ (e.g. using data to understand what your client’s needs are or how they make purchasing decisions). This can then ensure you have aligned the right products to meet these needs
- Advice suitability, as above ensuring the right clients receive the right products for their needs
- Evidence based practice, ensuring that the right data is held across staff in the business will help ensure Senior Manager and Certification Regime compliance i.e. you have the right people in the right role with the right responsibilities
- Data migration across systems to ensure the right data is placed across relevant fields, thus saving time and costs particularly for firms changing CRM systems for instance
At Model Office-MO we are pleased to announce that we are now have our Intelliflo integration at Beta level for data quality health checks. This means the system can run automated checks across all active client data to ensure any duplicated or missing data is identified and can be rectified immediately, this means if you’re operating a client portal, clients will know that you have taken the time to ensure their data is healthy, handled with care and (with more MO streamlined reports coming across client segmentation and product governance, AML and PEP sanctions checks) that you are offering suitable services based on this compliant data.
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