Mosaic studied six million FICC transactions from global and regional investment banks in U.S., Canada, UK, EU, Japan, South Africa, South America and Australia, surveying front office staff including traders, salespeople and quants, finding:
- Data quality and integrity is a critical challenge
66% of banks struggle with data quality, gaps in important data points and some transaction flows not being captured at all
- Banks want real-time analytics capabilities
83% of banks have no real-time access to transaction data and/or data analytics, largely due to the lack of a central repository
- Banks struggle to access their data
66% of banks said that the data they found most useful for their analytics is challenging to access because it is fragmented or that they have no access at all
- Reference data is unfit for purpose
50% of banks have reference data with no unified counterparty identifier, especially for client static data, and in a number of cases the data was altogether missing
Stemming from and propelled by the requirements from regulators following the 2008 market crash, investment banks made sizeable investments in data management during recent years – circa USD 88 million per year[1]. However, evidence suggests little ROI is typically achieved in the front office. The results of Mosaic’s survey indicate that the problem often lies in failing to aggregate, standardise and enrich data before implementing an analytics programme.
