The What, Where, How, and Why of Financial Data Management in Today's Capital Markets

This IDC Perspective explores the financial data management themes of data governance, data quality, and data security in the context of evolving data infrastructure and architecture choices and market dynamics. Technologically informed decision-making is an increasingly crucial competitive dimension among capital market participants. Their applications are hungry for meaningful data from which to extract an informed edge. Recent advances in artificial intelligence and impending advances in quantum and distributed ledger technology are causing a significant appreciation in the value of data. As financial data management as a science quickly evolves to meet the unique needs of this new operating reality, firms are scrambling to address infrastructure and architecture issues that might prevent them from making optimal data-informed decisions. The data and analytics content and services market is a highly competitive and dynamic ecosystem in which technology buyers have ample room to revisit their procurement choices, especially on the services side. Consistent heavy investment in the financial data services market is expected from buyers and sellers as the benefits from data-driven decision-making consistently exceed the cost of feeding tech with clean, secure, and enriched data sources. "Recent advances in technologies capable of extracting actionable value from financial and financially relevant data, for example, generative artificial intelligence, are redefining what data as an input means for modern competition across the capital markets," says Thomas Shuster, research director, Capital Markets Digital Strategies at IDC. "On par, firms that demonstrate a talent for obtaining, analyzing, or meaningfully transforming data are expected to come out ahead having provided themselves with a basis for making better decisions sooner than the competition."