In the age of Big Data, companies tend to get excited at the sheer level of information at their fingertips. Your Internet Service Provider can know all of your usage habits and is better positioned to offer you add-on services. Your dog groomer knows how often you bring in your pet and the services you insist on, so she can promote packages she knows you can’t resist. Not to be left out, your bank wants to get you on their newest product so you can make money while you spend it.
It’s a great time to be a marketer, as companies today know more about their current customers, target audience and competition than ever before. It’s the age of data management and it’s opening new doors every day. One that is open the widest, perhaps, is the opportunity to keep data in such a way that it actually delivers value and doesn’t just take up space on the server. Overall data management can be cumbersome and costly if not handled correctly. When going it alone, some banks may bite off more than they can chew.
Three giant banks recognized this potential obstacle and instead of going it alone, decided to partner with SmartStream Technologies. According to this post in Information Management, the goal of the partnership is to build a consolidated data management company in an effort to boost data quality while keeping overall management costs down. The three banks have been identified by The Wall Street Journal as Goldman Sachs Group, JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley.
The data management company, SPRed (Securities Product Reference Data) will evolve out of investments from each of the three banking giants of more than $1 million. As a result, member companies will be able to create a stream of consistent data that banks can use to best determine costs associated with transactions and pricing. And while the effort is a smart one as the banks aim to optimize the opportunity in data management while controlling costs, there are questions that are emerging in the industry.
For instance, how will the member companies share and manage data? How will master data management be handled and how will they address data governance and compliance considerations. All of these factors are critical to the operational and financial benefits of the collaboration. Once clearly defined, it can also provide a good baseline for companies in other industries to follow.
The point is, data management is essential, yet can be complex and expensive. If there are opportunities to collaborate with others in your industry, why not benefit from such a partnership? Once these giants lead the way, it may become standard practice.