The State of Information Integrity Briefing Center

Explore the ways that financial institutions can streamline, optimize and validate the flow of information, ensuring higher data quality, better business intelligence, and smarter decision-making. Here you'll find original research on data quality issues at over 250 financial institutions, plus case studies on leading financial firms, whitepapers, and solution profiles to help you make the business case for information integrity and business intelligence initiatives.

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Research: Achieving Information Integrity in Financial Analysis editor's choice

Research: Achieving Information Integrity in Financial Analysis

Executives at financial institutions constantly make decisions based on financial information. Yet the quality of those decisions is driven not only by the skill and insight of the decision-maker, but also the accuracy and integrity of the underlying data. From an operational risk standpoint, investments made in information integrity yield significant benefits from having increased confidence in decisions made using financial data. Read the whitepaper »

  • The Lowdown
    Improve Information Integrity for Financial Analyses

    Improve Information Integrity for Financial Analyses

    Data entry errors, formula corruption, and intentional fraud can lead to seriously flawed financial analyses, which in turn can lead to significant business losses and material misstatements. EMC Consulting helps organizations improve both data quality and analyst productivity with web-based Office Business Application (OBA) solutions that eliminate manual processes, centralize access, and implement version control, while still allowing analysts to work within Microsoft Excel®.
    Get the whitepaper »

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    White paper: Overcoming the Barriers to Business Intelligence

    Many business intelligence initiatives have failed because of inaccessible tools and insufficient reporting capabilities, leading to continued reliance on manual spreadsheet analyses. By seeking broader buy-in and involvement throughout the enterprise, firms can deploy business intelligence toward a highly-functional organization with greater depth in decision making that has a positive impact on the bottom line.
    Read the white paper »

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    Developing Portals to Integrate Wealth Management and Banking Services

    Banks have the opportunity to cross-sell wealth management and banking, but current systems do not easily support extended product sets. An integrated portal with shared client information simplifies business processes from account opening to servicing, contributing to increased efficiencies and greater sales.
    Read the solution brief »

Featured Assets

  • Webcast: Increasing Accuracy in Financial Analyses to Improve Decision Making

    Most senior-level financial services executives still regularly receive data from colleagues with errors — making accurate analysis for risk assessments, business performance management, or portfolio analysis all but impossible.

    Join Wall Street & Technology and EMC Consulting in an editorial perspectives webcast as we share the results of our recent "State of Information Integrity" survey and hear from leading experts about ways that firms are increasing accuracy in financial analyses. Watch the webcast »

  • Case Study: Real Estate Firm Achieves Real-Time Data Analytics

    The risk management team at a full-service real estate investment management and support services company needed to perform complex analyses with data sourced dirctly from the company's central asset management database. EMC Consulting created an Office Business Application solution that supports real-time data queries from analytic applications, leading to better decision making. Read the case study »

In-Depth

  • Case Study: CLS Bank Consolidates View of Foreign Exchange Trades

    To improve its management of trade data from banks, CLS turned to EMC Consulting to envision and define a business intelligence solution. Now, CLS and its member banks have a consolidated view of foreign exchange activity within the context of overall market trends, which supports compliance and regulatory requirements as well as ongoing business strategies.
    Read the case study »

  • Case Study: Expanded Reporting and Customization for Pharmacy Benefit Firm

    A world-class provider of Pharmacy Benefit Management services sought to expand the decision-support and reporting capabilities of a key subsidiary. EMC Consulting developed a dynamic, highly flexible and scalable solution framework, allowing the firm to achieve competitive differentiation with lower operating expenses. Now, over 400 internal users and nearly 500 client users benefit from faster turnaround time, greater customization and expanded capabilities, leading to higher overall client satisfaction.
    Read the case study »

  • Customizing Order Management Systems for Hedge Funds

    Hedge funds are driving several key advancements in order management systems (OMS), including increased coverage of security types, more robust currency capabilities, faster trade execution and greater transparency of liquidity. In selecting an OMS vendor and implementation strategy, hedge funds need to understand their own unique trading and processing requirements, as well as the challenges involved.
    Read the solution brief »

  • Automating Corporate Actions to Reduce Operational Risk

    Mistakes in processing corporate actions can result in huge financial losses. However, most firms still rely on manual processes for at least some part of the corporate actions lifecycle. End-to-end automation reduces operational risk through the adoption of standards for event types and messaging, with robust business processes for exception handling and notification processing.
    Read the solution brief »

  • Channel Management: Putting Customers at the Heart of Your Business

    Instead of selling individual isolated products, insurance enterprises must transform into customer-centric providers offering a full range of financial products and services. To support this differentiated customer experience, insurers will have to integrate information from agents and brokers, contact/service centers, and online portals, with a cohesive channel strategy ensuring maximum productivity and customer self-service.
    Read the solution brief »

Ask the Expert

Q.

We have thousands of uncontrolled spreadsheet applications in our firm and this data often supplies business intelligence and material reporting needs. How can I prevent the inherent errors that occur in data, business logic, or even changes that might be due to deliberate criminal conduct?

There are several steps that you can take to improve and protect the integrity of the information used in spreadsheet applications.

A.

As a general strategy, try to move away from using ad-hoc spreadsheet applications for complicated data analysis. While this is not always possible, you can minimize the threat that spreadsheet applications will be a source of serious compliance risk. Implement an automated business process that connects validated data with tested, debugged, and stable algorithms to get the answers you need, without adding complexity to IT environments.

Do this by eliminating the manual processes involved with acquiring data. Connect spreadsheets directly to line of business applications. By capturing data from the source, you can be assured that the latest and most accurate data is always used. Then manage critical macros and formulas by centralizing access to tested and debugged business logic. Create access and version controls that foster stronger oversight and eliminate inadvertent errors.

A comprehensive, integrated approach to improving the quality and governance of ad hoc spreadsheet applications is not as expensive or as complicated as it might seem.

 

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