The need to practice good data hygiene is intrinsically a housekeeping issue. If you don’t know what data you hold, or it is in different places in different formats then effectively you have a mess of unusable data.

In Australia the Royal Commission 2019 report mandated better reporting – necessitating a clean-up of data en masse.  Prior to that there was poor or no record keeping at all, or it was not easily accessible.

We’ve now entered a brave new world. We need data to be able to remain complaint. But more than that we need to leverage data more effectively to free up our advisers to better service their clients. A big part of that is giving clients the means to self-service over digital means when it comes the seemingly endless form filling that goes hand in hand with wealth management.

Data hygiene thus becomes an important facet in fulfilling these needs. The question within the industry is how we can grab disparate data points from disparate systems, cleanse and normalise them and place them where they need to be in terms of compliance and reporting, then store them in a single repository for future use.

That’s our job! We partner with clients to improve efficiency, meet compliance requirements and further growth.

The first element is extracting data using APIs; ingesting data from secure portals or processing images and emails with intelligent capture tools. The data then needs to be cleansed and normalised. In particular we look to remove repetition and make data points machine readable and in a standardised format. For this we use machine learning so that we can cross check and compare different data points to make sure what or who something refers to what we think it does. There are always lots of data discrepancies and you quite often get four or five data sets where the same person exists in all of them but their data is not the same. We then look to identify where data is missing so that advisers can see on an exceptions basis, what they need to do to be able to meet compliance standards onboard or complete a KYC check.

The idea is that once this is complete for one process, say compliance, then the adviser can push the new complete data record to a single reference book that then can be used as a single version of truth to inform other processes- thus creating a perfect data ecosystem.

Firstly though, data hygiene is obviously good from a reporting viewpoint. It means that the adviser can easily lay hands on any data point required by the regulator. Documents can be shown to have enough evidence points that x was done to y process as required. This can only be done if your data is collected and clean and in the same place. For this to happen automated workflows, document digitisation, paperless forms and e-signatures are your friends. Indeed, manual data collection, form population and wet signatures are inefficient, prone to human error and costly in terms of human resource.

Data hygiene can also be leveraged to help with the onboarding process. In turn that helps to inform the KYC, risk and planning elements.

What this means is that when you have a clean and single data base you can pre prepopulate forms as much as possible and then identify where the gaps lie easily too. It makes it so much easier for both the end advisor as well as the client. Essentially the system provides digital sticky notes where data is missing.  It removes the need to enter the same piece of data several times and it also makes for the possibility for clients to self-service when it comes to data upload -for example they could upload a scan or picture of their passport for verification - systems can automate the capture and verify it.

We think that done right, digital formats are so much easier to use and there is a good level of uptake. Covid has accelerated this by about five years and even the older generation, previously thought to never willingly engage with digital tools, are now using this.

The more data an adviser can collect on a client and the easier that is to do then the better the client experience and that adds to the bottom line! (All reports point to the cost of advice increasing. Harnessing tools to increase productivity and gain clients without the need to increase headcount makes sense.

The more you know about a potential client before the first discussion, the more rewarding the meeting will become. Using data hygiene tools to find out what you already know and then sending a form to a client pre-meeting and collecting missing data in advance means more time can be spent discussing opportunities or options with the client. This is the engagement play. You can begin asking meaningful questions, tailored specifically for the client and you can focus your conversations on the future because you already know their past. This

Finally, data hygiene helps with strategic insight. This is where data can be used to gain visibility over a business and its clients. If a dealer group has 200 or 300 advisers then they need to be able to identify trends and segment and so on to inform strategic decision making.

It also provides visibility over the business to know who the clients are, what they are investing in and the like. This is very pertinent at a time where M&A activity is rife. Being able to accurately position the business is a massive advantage, there is a considerable advantage of knowing who you are and what you do!

Ultimately our aim is to help our clients get to a model where they have frictionless data entry and where it is up to date reliable and clean. Once the data capture has been done then it is held in a single golden copy in a good format where it can be reused over and over, as outlined.

Ultimately the cost of not doing it is more that the cost of doing this. The tools exist to do this fairly painlessly – to use what you have got and then fill in the gaps – and to do this with minimal disruption by using our well-tested automation and internal process efficiency measures. Done right it is a strong efficiency and scale play that the advisory world should welcome.