The C-Suite

The ability to track and visualise data lineage is becoming increasingly important in financial services.  When valuing portfolios or modelling risk, or investigating referential data in regulatory reporting, firms need to trace data back to its source, demonstrate who has looked at it, what quality verification it has undergone and what tests it has passed.

Benjamin Franklin once said, “In this world, there is nothing certain but death and taxes.” I’d like to add one intertwined level of certainty – the modern staple. In fact, staples are killing worker productivity and they’re a major part of our tax process.

When I began my career in finance almost 20 years ago, the CFO was a very different position to the role it is today. I started out in the Big Four (when it was the Big Five) and spent the first 12 years of my career working with many different CFOs across a broad spectrum of industries and countries.

Many of the most dynamic technological innovations in the last 25 years have promoted the idea of breaking down barriers, improving accessibility, and bringing the world’s citizens closer together than ever before.

None of us are getting any younger, but, in a way, the workplace is. Millennials are now the largest generation in the workforce in both the UK and US. By next year, this cohort – and the even younger Generation Z group that follows them – will make up more than half the workforce globally.

In the past couple of decades, due diligence has evolved and improved, thanks in large part to the advance of technology and digitisation. Where before the process was frustrated by physical data rooms and huge volumes of paper documents

It’s no secret that life as we once knew it has been transformed using technology with responsiveness playing a key role in keeping pace with digital transformation while prioritising security. For example, the introduction of biometric identification in the consumer ecosystem has been successfully accepted as ensuring superior security rapidly.

It might be counter‐intuitive to many, but securing credit as a high net‐worth (HNW) individual can be extremely complicated. Indeed, it is a common misconception that banks will readily––happily, even––loan money to those who have a net‐worth in the millions.

As expected, the opening weeks of 2019 have been dominated by Brexit. The latest development – albeit a predictable one – saw Theresa May’s proposed withdrawal agreement roundly rejected by MPs, leaving the UK with no clear or determined path for leaving the EU.