TSAM London: Clearwater Analytics on Why a Clear Data Strategy is the Foundation for Financial Firms

At TSAM London, Stephen Roberts from Clearwater Analytics laid out a clear strategy for financial firms struggling to maintain a single, trustworthy view of their data, risk, and reporting. Roberts emphasized that a clear data strategy is the essential foundation. Firms must first decide who needs what data and why, before they can build an architecture that gets that information to the right systems, applications, and end-users seamlessly.

Clearwater Analytics highlighted that many fundamental processes, like reconciliation, reporting, and quarter-end close, are often fragmented as historically, managers have used separate “point solutions” for each process that don’t communicate with each other. This results in data being manually shuffled, often between spreadsheets, with little or no validation, which wastes time and introduces significant risk of errors. Roberts argues that by setting a data strategy first, managers can identify the necessary tools to automate data flow, apply checks and validations, and speed up these crucial, yet slow, processes.

When it comes to modernizing their tech stack, Clearwater Analytics urged firms to focus on removing complexity, not adding it as its pointed out that bringing in new systems for analysis often creates more problems, forcing teams to deal with new data requirements, additional technology, and more vendors. Instead, firms should determine the bare minimum required to achieve their analytical goals and build from that foundation.

Ultimately, Clearwater Analytics concluded that firms must be strategic, not tactical and firms need to look at their overarching business goals, whether that’s growing assets in a single fund or expanding into new asset classes, and only then choose the right systems and architecture to facilitate that specific growth.