In today’s data-driven environment, it has become increasingly crucial for asset managers to maintain full visibility into the lifecycle of their data – how it transforms and flows from its source to destination. With this, data lineage tools have grown in importance to help firms track changes made to their data, find and fix gaps, and see which processes were used when their data was updated. This not only enhances data quality, but it also instills confidence in managers that the data they are using in decision-making is accurate.
In addition to these benefits, data lineage can automatically provide managers with necessary context into investment data instead of requiring them to manually map it. Most notably, it enables them to comply with regulations, trust their data and have a better understanding of its impact.
Compliance
Asset managers have to deal with multiple compliances. Some are voluntary, like GIPS, while regulatory bodies like the SEC impose others. The data for these compliances are mission critical, making its traceability vital. Without data lineage software, it could take countless hours to trace data and, if it’s wrong, there could be serious financial repercussions.
Trust
Data lineage tools provides users with surrounding details, including information on data sources, how datasets are built and aggregated, data quality, metadata lineage, and any transformations along the way. It also helps ensure that accurate, complete and trustworthy data is being used to drive key business decisions.
Impact
Data lineage also provides a deeper understanding of data’s impact at a granular level, enabling users to see any changes to downstream systems when making a change in datasets. For forward lineage, users should be able to pick an attribute, say quantity, and view all reports that are consuming that attribute and how. Some reports might use it to calculate the market value, whereas some might directly use the quantity itself. Having that level of insight allows users to understand the impact of each data point in their downstream systems.
While there are challenges associated with implementing data lineage, they can easily be tackled using a data management solution. IVP Enterprise Data Management provides complete forward and backward metadata lineage management and a robust data catalog that was custom built for buy-side asset management firms.
Learn how IVP EDM – an award-winning, data lineage software – is assisting managers through its robust data lineage, data governance framework and data catalog offering.
