Top 5 Takeaways from SIFMA Ops 2024: Designing the Future of Connected Data

SIFMA Ops was a highlight of my year. The conference was packed with interesting people, ideas, and insights into what’s ahead for our industry. At the most recent event, which took place in sunny San Diego, I enjoyed the dynamic discussions on topics ranging from operational transformation and settlement innovation to digital assets and (of course) AI. I also had the privilege of participating in a lively panel myself, alongside our partner from Snowflake, Chris Napoli, who is Head of Wealth & Asset Management there; and our mutual colleague, Anand Pandya, Head of Financial Services at Hakkoda, who moderated our chat.

In our conversation, we got to dive deep on my favorite topic: data. In case you missed the live session and want to watch the full replay, you can find it here. Or, read on for our top five takeaways.

1. Our wealth management ecosystem has a foundational data problem

Data management is a universal problem for wealth management firms today. It’s an outdated foundational layer that needs to be fixed before we can make other advances effectively. As organizations build their strategies around smarter analytics and better digital experiences, they need trusted, curated data underneath — but that’s not the current reality. We see the problems firsthand in our clients’ challenges: from the data structure, to the workflows, to their data reconciliation issues, it’s clear we don’t yet have trusted data at the core.

Today, we too often move data around from one bucket to another, and every time we do that, it’s not only a lot of work to manage, but also a hit to data accuracy. In addition to the issue of accuracy, the other major issue is the timeliness of data. There are cases when the data may be accurate, but it shows up too late in the client experience. We need to stop depending on overnight processes and create the infrastructure for real-time data, because that’s what is going to drive the optimal digital experience our clients are striving to achieve.

2. Rather than sending  data, we should start sharing  data instead

Every time you send a piece of data to someone else, it’s a new data set. Not only that, it creates a new need for validation and a potential data break. This only adds to our collective data reconciliation problem. Instead, firms can start sharing original sources of data and collaborate on the data directly, for real-time accuracy and zero reconciliations.

This idea is one of the main reasons we are partnering with Snowflake to turbo-charge the development of our new DataXChange platform. Snowflake is a cross-cloud normalization layer, which enables communication from one cloud provider to another. But what’s really powerful is that users can communicate from one Snowflake instance to another without ever moving data — you can just get a view into someone else’s universe. This means we can transfer data without actually moving it — and we can also move code in the same way. There’s no more need for file transfer protocols (FTPs). Now, we can bring the code and the applications to the data, rather than duplicating and sending data out in countless directions.

3. Abstracted data experiences are accessible data experiences

Raw data is complex and hard to manage, and requires many steps to become curated and usable. Especially as non-technical business users increasingly look to utilize data in their analytics and workflows, we have to create data views and experiences tailored for the needs of users across the enterprise, at varying levels of technical expertise. That’s where an abstraction layer comes into play. By designing an abstracted data experience that sits above the raw data layer, we can simplify the presentation of what matters to any particular user and improve their ability to interact with it meaningfully.

4. Be fanatical about governance

The importance of data governance cannot be understated, and we believe it is a huge opportunity for innovation. In fact, governance is the defining focus for our DataXChange platform — we’re reimagining the very meaning of the word.

Governance is no longer a defensive play stemming from regulatory requirements about how data is stored and accessed. Instead, the opportunity is for governance to be proactive, for the data architecture to be smart enough to convey whether the data within has been vetted and if it can be trusted. It means tracing data lineage accurately, understanding where data transformations are occurring, and ensuring you have the logic to validate and attest to that data’s integrity — integrated into the platform itself.

Data governance shouldn’t be just a process or after-the-fact checklist — it should be an anticipatory, rules-driven intelligence baked right into the data architecture and workflows. The end goal of our efforts is to deliver trusted data, and the only way to do that is through smart data governance.

5. We all need stronger data governance, but firms don’t have to build it alone

Now that everyone has realized the importance of that data governance work, we see many of our clients doing the same thing, trying to solve our universal data problem each on their own. But rather than tackling it alone, instead they can work with ecosystem partners like BetaNXT who are doing the work to accelerate the industry’s innovation at scale. We’re making a big investment to do it once for everyone at BetaNXT, with DataXChange, and by partnering with Snowflake we can accelerate our own efforts even more because they have already done a lot of heavy lifting in building a scalable ecosystem. Why not join the momentum we’re already building?

Looking ahead: A paradigm shift

The work we’re doing with DataXChange is helping to usher in a paradigm shift for wealth management — a new era built upon a foundation of trusted data, without the complexity and challenges that exist today. This pivot will free organizations to elevate their efforts and innovate more easily without worrying about their data governance. Firms will be empowered to bring their code and applications to their data, rather than endlessly duplicating data sets and creating more potential issues. Ultimately, BetaNXT and Snowflake are taking the complexity out of managing data, to power a Connected Wealth experience from end to end.

BetaNXT is currently in a pilot phase with DataXChange, testing and validating the platform with some of our key clients. DataXChange will officially launch in Q1 of 2025, with a roadmap of new services and applications built upon it. To learn more, please get in touch.