TDWI Checklist Report: Best Practices for Data Integrity in Financial Services

Data integrity refers to an enterprise’s ability to keep its data accurate, consistent, and contextual at every stage in its life cycle.

Data integrity is strategic for financial services firms. Maintaining accurate, consistent, and contextual data helps with offensive and defensive strategies. The offensive value of data integrity is in delivering growth, profitability, productivity, and other facets of fresh business value. The defensive value is in helping financial services firms mitigate risks and comply with a growing range of legal and regulatory mandates.

This TDWI Checklist discusses how data integrity best practices help financial services to succeed in five ways. These include protecting sensitive data from cybersecurity threats, leveraging relevant data to comply with legal and regulatory mandates, exploring operational data to identify process improvement opportunities, harnessing comprehensive customer data to grow the relationship, and democratizing data science to improve advanced analytics.

Five ways that data integrity best practices help financial services succeed:

• Protect sensitive data from cybersecurity threats
• Leverage relevant data to comply with legal and regulatory mandates
• Explore operational data to identify process improvement opportunities
• Harness comprehensive customer data to grow the relationship
• Democratize data science to improve advanced analytics

Protect sensitive data from cybersecurity threats

Data integrity is fundamental to financial services firms’ ongoing battle against cyberthreats. It’s essential that banks, brokerages, and other financial services firms protect highly critical and valuable data from fraud, theft, tampering, eavesdropping, unauthorized disclosure, malware, and other threat vectors.

Data privacy is one of the most critical cybersecurity concerns in financial services. That’s because these firms collect large volumes of sensitive customer data, including personally identifiable information such as passwords, credit card numbers, and Social Security numbers. Indeed, the broad shift toward self-service, online, and mobile access to banking, brokerage, and other financial services makes these firms’ applications and databases attractive targets for hacking, malware, and other cyberthreats. These vulnerabilities are exacerbated by the fact that many self-service users may be unaware of these threats and fail to take simple safeguards (such as adopting strong passwords) that could mitigate the most severe vulnerabilities.

Download this TDWI checklist report to explore how data integrity best practices can help your financial services organization succeed.