5 Key Findings from MarkLogic-Sponsored Financial Data Leaders Study

Financial institutions differ in their levels of maturity in managing and utilizing their enterprise data. To understand trends and winning strategies in getting the greatest value from this data, we recently co-sponsored a survey with the Financial Information Management WBR Insights research division.

In this post, you will find information about the survey, a summary of key findings, and how MarkLogic helps data teams at leading financial organizations get more value from their complex data, faster.

About the Survey

The report provides benchmarking information about data maturity, uses of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), and adoption of cloud capabilities for data management. Respondents discussed business benefits they are intending to achieve, and challenges they are confronting.

Survey participants were from a mix of financial organizations, including asset management firms, hedge funds, insurance companies, and investment banks, with the respondents fairly evenly distributed across seniority levels and roles in analytics, data, IT, and financial information.

Five Key Findings

Overall, the survey shows that data leaders are focused on a number of different initiatives to connect metadata and data across the enterprise to drive business value — but that challenges and barriers still lie between many financial organizations and their data management goals.

Room for improvement in data maturity and data quality

While the majority of respondents believe their level of sophistication in terms of data management is “at parity” with the competition (52%), almost a third (31%) believe that they have room to improve data management in their organizations. Additionally, a sizable percentage (43%) say that while their data quality standards have become more robust in the past 12 months, they haven’t been able to keep up with industry standards. This is hindering their progress in achieving desired business benefits like data integrations with partners, easier compliance, and reduced costs. Enterprises should adopt flexible data platforms that can readily adapt to changing business needs and unlock the true power of the organization’s data.

Current data applications aren’t delivering desired value

According to the study, cloud data management is the only capability where a majority (52%) say their current applications deliver excellent results. For other critical capabilities — data analytics, risk and compliance, data modeling and governance, data integration, and data search and semantic tools — respondents report only moderate to low value. Significantly, most respondents are getting only moderate (41%) or low (24%) value from their applications for data search and semantic tools. Adopting technologies for semantic search (search with “meaning”) makes the process of finding the right information more streamlined and intuitive than with traditional search tools.

Increasing use of AI

Financial institutions have significantly increased their use of AI in the past year. Most of the respondents (84%) say they are already leveraging AI and/or machine learning to automate applicable solutions (56%) or to build predictive models (28%). Enterprises need to ensure that these AI tools are leveraging trusted, high-quality data.

Shift in attitude towards cloud

Historically, financial organizations have lagged in their adoption of cloud services, but this seems to be changing. Almost three-quarters of respondents (73%) say that within three years they will have the vast majority of their data management hosted in the cloud. Enterprises should make sure that the technologies they select can support on-premises, cloud, and hybrid cloud deployments, to make it easier to adapt to new business requirements.

Data volume, complexity, and accessibility are top challenges

Rapid data growth or expansion, difficulties finding data across dissimilar data stores and silos, and data complexity were cited as the primary challenges to financial organizations’ data management initiatives. Enterprises should look to technologies that make it easier to access and analyze data across operations in different sectors of the business.

The MarkLogic Solution

MarkLogic helps customers create value from complex data faster. Our platform ingests data from any source, creating and refining metadata to support powerful models. Customers use these models for deep search and query, building enterprise applications, and bringing unique insights to analytics and machine learning.

MarkLogic is being used by leading financial services organizations to facilitate the operationalization of data across the business for faster insights and more effective compliance. To learn how, please visit our Financial Services industry solutions site.

To download a copy of the report, please click on the image below: