Data Management
Understanding and making use of data.
Data, data, data.
Constantly increasing requirements in risk management and in regulation demand that our clients implement and assure the quality of central data warehouses. Reliable data management and the comprehensive ability to analyse are critical factors in the success of every financial service provider.
The quality of the data provided and the understanding of how these data can be used are an important part of this process. We boast not only the technical competence to provide, aggregate and assure the quality of data, but our business expertise enables us – along with our clients – to understand and analyse the data and to use them accordingly to optimise business and risks for our clients.
Understanding and making use data.
- Design of information architectures and the definition data models / datamarts
- Design, mapping and implementation of interfaces
- Aggregation and quality assurance of data
- Design, implementation and testing of economic, regulatory and risk reporting
- Integration of standard software and reporting tools
Data Management in practice.
Implementation of Data Management
On behalf of a client, Firstwaters took on and implemented the requirements of data management in the treasury division. The objective of the conversion was to provide data to the bank’s central data warehouse. Only information that was not available in the data warehouse was delivered by the affected front-office systems via direct interfaces. Following successful quality assurance and aggregation, the data is transformed to the expected target format of the standard software Ambit Focus and made available for further processing.
XL Cubed was introduced as a tool for the actual reporting and was used to generate reports.
The challenge of the project was meeting the requirements of standard reporting and, at the same time, ensuring the necessary response time for ad hoc reporting.
A German state bank has decided to change its system for end-of-day market data provision for the entire bank and, at the same time, to outsource the hosting of its market data system. Firstwaters is supporting the coordination of the necessary activities across all departments.
- Design and implementation of a suitable distribution platform as a means of communication for incoming and outgoing data flows as well as data distribution within the bank.
- Adaptation of the end-of-day process for the entire bank for market data relating to the change resulting from switching systems.
- Support of more than 30 intra-bank customers regarding market data reference and interpretation, the implementation of new formats and systematic testing.
To ensure data integrity, the productive conversion of all customers on a shared ‘big bang’ conversation date.
Design and implementation of the information architecture
A private German bank has tasked Firstwaters with the redesdign of its IT information structure. Together with the responsible partners at the bank, our consulting team executed a GAP analysis, as the first step, on the basis of the existing information structure in order to determine the specific fields of action. The recommended measures were approved and decided on by the bank’s management.
Under the project guidance of Firstwaters, the concrete implementation of the defined measures was then implemented by our IT consultants. The bank had previously entrusted the consulting services of Firstwaters with the implementation of a new data warehouse. The task was to design a central data model across the Frankfurt and Luxembourg locations and to design and implement the interfaces for the provision of the necessary data.
Additionally, our consultants used SAP BO to establish management reporting in the data warehouse. In doing so, the important success factors were remaining in line with the stipulated performance, the assurance of timely availability of the data on the following day and the achievement of a high level of data quality and consistency in the reporting.