Driven by imperatives around digitization, AI and the exploitation of strategic data insights, we are observing a continued renewal and elevation of enterprise data management (EDM) practices within capital markets and investment firms, with stronger imperatives spearheaded top-down by the business, new levels of urgency and increased funding to develop next generation capabilities.

Our study highlights the operational and strategically important themes which firms are pursuing to achieve successful outcomes for EDM — among these:

• We see ambitions towards overcoming under-exploitation of data, business-entwined data enablement, more friction-free data governance and privacy first by design.

• The front office remains a focus for technology investments— to deliver digitally-oriented “data-rich” front office propositions, embrace faster value-added data enablement, enable mass portfolio customization, and enhance iterative hypothesis/ideation testing capabilities.

• Moreover, the frontiers for data technology continue to shift towards usability and making data accessible. In general, ‘experiential features’ such as usability and ease of use for data tools rank very high across buyside and sellside segments.

• These fit into the ongoing dynamic within many organizations toward facilitating a broader democratization of data and insights. Features such as intuitive UI/UX, business friendly/self-assembly methods, self-service data analytics approaches, low code/no code, and collaboration features are highly valued – for functions such as data discovery/search, data preparation, and (automated/smart) data classification.