This report explores data management and its newfound position at the top of the strategic agenda for wealth management firms, driven by the dual imperatives of enhancing client outcomes and meeting increasing regulatory and operational demands. Across the industry, firms are recognising that data is no longer just a back-office concern but a core business asset – one that underpins growth, efficiency, and competitive differentiation.

This report argues that data is not merely a technical function or a concern purely of operations departments. Everybody in a wealth business interacts with data, and that makes data everybody’s business. Although senior leaders such as chief operating officers (COOs) or chief data officers (CDOs) typically retain overall accountability, there is growing consensus that data ownership must be embedded across an organisation.

Firms have high expectations for how improved data capabilities can transform both the client experience and internal operations. Good data enables more personalised, timely, and proactive client engagement. It allows workflows to be streamlined and reduces reliance on the kinds of manual processes which inevitably introduce errors.

At the same time, advanced analytics are providing deeper insights into client behaviour, sales effectiveness, and business performance – supporting more informed decision-making and targeted growth strategies.

The benefits of improved data also extend beyond the front office. Compliance and regulatory functions especially stand to gain from more accessible, consistent, and reliable data. Faster reporting, improved accuracy, and greater transparency are becoming increasingly important as regulatory scrutiny intensifies. This makes good data not only a driver of growth but also a critical enabler of risk management and regulatory compliance.

But the journey toward effective data management is not without challenges. Many firms are still operating across fragmented legacy systems, making it difficult to consolidate, standardise, and ultimately get true value from their data. The process of identifying, cleaning, and integrating data – particularly unstructured client information – remains complex and resource-intensive. And although many firms share the ambition of creating a single source of truth, fully realising it is still a challenge.

Although the precise contents of a data strategy will vary between firms according to their specific needs, implementation remains the most challenging aspect. This is why people and organisational culture are critical to success. What might at first glance appear to be a primarily technical challenge becomes just as much a human-centred challenge. Securing organisation-wide buy-in, investing in training, and fostering a data-first mindset are all essential to embed the new ways of working that allow good data to flourish.

This report argues that establishing a robust data strategy – supported by appropriate governance, technology investment, and cultural alignment – is essential for all wealth firms, regardless of size. As the industry continues to evolve, the ability to harness high-quality, well-structured data will be a defining factor in determining which firms can successfully leverage emerging technologies, including artificial intelligence (AI), and deliver sustained value to clients.

The transition from fragmented manual processes to integrated and data-driven operations represents a significant opportunity. Firms that can effectively capture, manage, and utilise their data will not only improve efficiency and productivity but also strengthen client trust and unlock new avenues for growth.

Introduction
Data is finally having its day. Across the wealth industry, the challenge of building a ‘single source of truth’ for data is rising urgently to the top of firms’ agendas.

For many years, the data problem within wealth management has been lurking in the background. It was a growing issue that everyone knew existed, but which firms regarded as secondary, painful to deal with, and a headache to resolve. They recognised that their data environments were fragmented, inconsistent, and poorly governed. But addressing the problem was complex, operationally difficult, and resource-intensive – and there were always more pressing items in the in-tray, more business items demanding attention.

The resistance went well beyond the data clean-up itself. It reflected a broader spectrum of underlying issues within many wealth firms: legacy technology stacks, limited appetite for operational change, and the growing scale and complexity of the data used across wealth management businesses.

However, there is now an accelerating cultural acceptance that good data – by which we mean data that is accurate, accessible, consistent, timely, and well-governed – is a business-wide issue, not just the remit of the IT or operations departments.

Today, good data is critical for business growth. Good data underpins the modern wealth management business. It is essential for:

• Client reporting
• Regulatory responses
• Portfolio performance
• Executive management information
• Risk management
• AI and analytics
• Client experience and service

Amid the industry’s drive for growth and scale, increased regulatory obligations, and an unrelenting M&A environment, the need for high-quality data is stronger than ever.

The rise and adoption of artificial intelligence across the wealth industry is also a high-profile driver of the need for better data. AI’s effectiveness depends entirely on the quality of the data beneath it. Its prominence and sheer potential are now serving to focus minds on the need for accurate, timely, and trustworthy data – without which AI is a non-starter, let alone capable of serving broader business needs.

Collected, managed, and used well, good data can yield significant results for wealth firms in driving improved efficiency, productivity, business management, regulatory compliance, and – most importantly – client service. However, it is complex, multi-faceted, and heavily reliant on the buy-in of the whole business for successful outcomes. It is an ongoing part of day-to-day business – or should be.

Why data management is everyone’s responsibility
Although there have long been individuals pushing for greater focus on the data problem, today there is a much broader and stronger recognition across the wealth management industry of the importance and commercial necessity of good data management.

That includes recognising that persistent challenges within the industry – such as poor productivity and slow response times to reporting – can trace their roots back to poor-quality or poorly organised data, sitting in silos across the business.

Good data is also at the foundation of how firms respond to many of the other challenges facing modern wealth management:

• Clients who demand a more personalised and tailored approach to their relationships
• The budgeting and performance choices facing all firms
• The ramp-up in M&A activity that requires accurate representation of a business’ state of health
• Ever-increasing regulatory requirements that demand evidence for compliance

Wealth businesses are now crafting data strategies designed to respond to these challenges. These are not just the remit of the operations department, but go company-wide, as data moves to the forefront of business strategy. These data strategies often go hand-in-hand with technology implementation or upgrades.

Executive attention is also turning to data quality as executives realise its importance to the AI projects in which they have invested high hopes and, often, extensive resources. Operations teams are implementing data governance regimes to ensure existing data is cleaned, and new data is being captured in a more timely, disciplined and accurate manner.

Executives are implementing new processes and workflows, alongside training and education, to take everyone in the business on the journey towards good data. Attention is being given to the outputs required from the data, and the ease of access to support reporting across all departments. Good data, and its effective management, supported by buy-in across the business, have the potential to be transformative for firms and clients alike.

Everyone within a wealth business interacts with or uses data in some form or another. That makes it everyone’s responsibility to ensure that a data strategy succeeds.

Our research
For this paper, we conducted a series of qualitative interviews over the course of Q1 2026 with executives at largely mid-tier firms in the UK wealth community. All the firms we spoke with are actively working to raise the standards of their data and are implementing technology to achieve this.

The firms we spoke with are at different stages of that journey. Some already have a data strategy in place. Others have major data projects in play. All are moving away from siloed data and are working towards an integrated single source of truth, typically through a data lake or warehouse. The objective at front of mind for these firms is achieving not just good, but excellent data.

The challenges that firms face in implementing a successful data strategy are broadly recognised across the industry:

• Legacy systems, holding scattered or siloed data across different departments which don’t speak to each other.
• Inadequate maturity for data governance.
• Lack of business buy-in for data initiatives.
• Weak ongoing management, leading to inconsistent standards.
• Workflows and processes that require manual interventions to check data and correct errors.

These problems need to be rectified quickly. Clients are increasingly demanding in their desire for personalised advice, timely outputs, and frictionless access to their investments and performance reporting.

However, beyond the high-profile, high-level challenges outlined above, firms are also grappling with more granular issues. These are often similar across firms, and it is these issues that we have surfaced through our interview process with several wealth businesses, including private banks, wealth managers, and advice businesses.

In the pages that follow, we’ll be exploring these challenges, and discovering how firms are resolving them.

Why now
The drive towards good data and robust data management has accelerated in recent years and, at most firms, is enjoying greater prominence than ever. Reasons why include:

• The proliferation of fragmented data across custodians, platforms, legacy systems, and client-provided sources has made it increasingly difficult to maintain consistency, accuracy, and a single source of truth.
• Rising regulatory expectations, and the need for robust governance, auditability, and risk control, mean firms must embed data discipline directly into their workflows rather than treat it as an afterthought.
• Growing client demand for transparency, personalisation, and real-time insight requires firms to transform raw data into clear, contextualised information that supports better decisions and stronger adviser-client relationships.
• The surge in unstructured data volumes, particularly of client data contained in emails, PDFs, or client correspondence, makes it difficult to capture in historic systems.
• The deployment of AI and analytics tools is exposing weak legacy data foundations.
• Specific pressure points that arise in day-to-day business, such as regulatory deadlines and annual reviews, also expose data weaknesses.
• Ongoing M&A activity quickly highlights the need for good data to produce an accurate picture of business health.

A 2026 Semarchy global survey found that 51 percent of organisations pursue AI initiatives without Master Data Management (MDM), and 38 percent have no data quality framework, leading to significant project delays. Executives now understand that advanced analytics are only as good as the data that feeds them.

Our research found four key themes that have characterised firms' data journeys. Firms are:

• Driving business growth and enhanced client relationships through data: high-quality data enables more personalised client engagement, better-informed decision-making, and improved outcomes – positioning firms to drive revenue growth and strengthen competitive differentiation.

• Improving efficiency to reduce cost and enable scale: the ability to reduce cost and enable scale through reduced manual intervention and better processes creates significant opportunities to lower costs and support scalable operations.
• Bridging the gap between data strategy and execution: creating a data strategy is one thing – implementing it to achieve that single ‘source of truth’ is where the really hard work takes place.
• Embedding a data-driven culture across the organisation: data strategies will fail if they don’t bring people with them. People from the board down to individual relationship managers (RMs) need to buy into the data journey, and data champions within organisations need to clearly illustrate their benefits.

Even though wealth leaders take different approaches to transforming their data management depending on their business models, all are aiming for the goal of a single source of truth for their data. Some are working in-house to get to their desired state, while others are using a combination of internal and external resourcing.

Firms typically set a timeline of between 18 months and two years to achieve their data goals – recognising that not everything can be done all at once and that complexities are inevitable, not least in getting the supporting technology in place. Depending on the maturity of their data strategy or project progress, the goal of establishing a single source of truth for their data may be some distance away but, crucially, change is under way.

Our research examines this progress – revealing what is forefront of senior stakeholders’ minds right now as they attempt to achieve that single source of truth and how they are overcoming the bumps along the road. 

Interested in reading the full report? You can find it online here.

About the WealthTech Insight Series (WTIS)
This research is part of The Wealth Mosaic’s WealthTech Insight Series (WTIS), an ongoing and
developing research process, mixing online surveys and interviews, and focused exclusively on technology in the wealth management sector across the world.

Rather than a one-off research process, the WTIS will seek to build an ongoing program of research among wealth managers of different types across the world on a broad range of technology and related topics, building up an aggregated knowledge base of both qualitative views and perspectives as well as quantitative data points.

Discover our research collection!

• Optimising revenue management – read here
• AI and analytics in wealth management – read here
• From survival to reinvention: the new playbook for technology spend in wealth management – read here
• The European wealth playbook for growth – read here
• The role of technology for recruitment and retention within wealth management – read here
• The quest to become the best – becoming the trusted wealth coach and adviser – read here
• Productivity and growth in wealth management – read here
• Managing model portfolios on multiple platforms – read here

About Raw Knowledge
Raw Knowledge is a specialist data provider and data management firm under the Industrial Thought group of companies. 

Raw Knowledge began life as part of sister company Financial Software (FSL). Its team helped identify the need to improve industry access to quality excess reportable income (ERI) data and provided this to both its own and FSL clients. As its team, customer base and capabilities grew, Raw Knowledge separated from FSL in 2024 to begin offering its own solutions and services.  

Today, Raw Knowledge provides the most comprehensive ERI data in the market and helps businesses make better, data-driven decisions with its Managed Smart Data Platform. This pioneering data management platform creates a traceable and harmonised view of businesses’ disparate data sources to help them streamline and scale their operations, act faster on insights with fewer errors and maintain a clear audit trail.

About The Wealth Mosaic
The Wealth Mosaic is a UK-headquartered online solution provider directory and knowledge resource, focused specifically on the wealth management industry.

For wealth managers, the buy side of our marketplace, The Wealth Mosaic is designed to enable discovery of key solutions, solution providers, and knowledge resources by specific business needs.

For solution providers and vendors, the sell side of our marketplace, The Wealth Mosaic exists to support the positioning, exposure, and business development needs of these firms in a more complex and demanding market.

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