Data Migration and Data Management

EXF Insights

THE PROBLEM

Buy side Investment Managers and services firms continually struggle with data and the ability to confidently use it as a source of information to support their corporate strategies. This is a vital part of any organisation’s survival for the future. However, we consistently see many organisations  still struggling with the basics – the lack of a ‘fit for purpose’ data management platform with core coverage underpinning customer, product and services reference and transactional data.

We find that businesses face a number of common challenges. These include:

  • Years of business transformation logic development that exist in numerous platforms and EUC’s
  • Complex proprietary data management software often not perceived not to be adding value
  • Decades worth of legacy estate development
  • Mergers and acquisitions creating challenges integrating multiple platforms and data sources
  • Significant investment sunk into old technology and a lack of appetite to switch to more modern technologies and architectures
  • High cost of ownership and increasing talent scarcity in running old technologies
  • Frustration by business consumers caused by no proper data management, quality and governance functions

THE BENEFITS

If you face some of these challenges, your ETL migration and data management program is in danger of being delayed or put on hold, or you are at the start of your journey then now might be a good time to consider other options. A product that will offer you modern ways to accelerate delivery of your data platform, improve governance, auditability and deliver a sustainable, cost effective, performing model. Based on previous engagements we typically find that our product and stream-lined implementation approach yield the following benefits:

  • Pairing back operational costs by up to 50%
  • Reducing data migration timeline by up to 70%
  • Reducing the time to integrate and master new data sources and targets by 40-60 percent
  • Improving accuracy through automation by up to 60%
  • Increasing productivity of your data analysts by 50% by letting them focus on analysis and addition of rules for new errors
  • Self-documenting as-built integration with visualization and data ownership
  • ML/AI driven scoring mechanisms offering with full instrumentation, lineage, cataloguing and dashboards along with automated prediction, prevention & fixing of data errors.
  • Faster, cheaper client/system onboarding with considerably fewer resources

OUR SOLUTION

We have created  a product called EXF Insights which leverages both ETL and non ETL tools in a two-stage engineering approach. This accelerates the data migration, management and integration delivery for both structured and  unstructured data.

EXF Insights is a cloud native, comprehensive feature-rich platform that streamlines and automates data loading and, data transformation. It reduces the need for manual analysis and contains all of the necessary user interfaces and audit capabilities to underpin these processes.

EXF Insights improves accessibility, consistency and the quality of data across your legacy systems and multiple data sources leverages our proven metadata and ML/AI driven scoring mechanism. The product includes full instrumentation, lineage, cataloguing and dashboards along with automated prediction, prevention & fixing of data errors. You also benefit from faster, cheaper client/system onboarding with significantly fewer resources.

TYPES OF CHALLENGES WE LOOK TO SOLVE

Whatever data challenges or strategic objectives you have we provide a comprehensive set of services to address them. Here are a few examples – there are many more – of the typical challenges we look to help with. Amongst many of the benefits called out above, accelerating your journey and providing you with a positive experience through this is key to us.

Data Conversion and Migration programmes

Our platform has a unique set of ETL and non ETL tools which we use to help accelerate your end to end data migration and integration deliveries however complex they may be. We leverage a two-stage, ten step engineering approach that meets the requirements for both structured and unstructured data. The first stage involves reverse engineering, reconciling and cleansing your legacy ETL and business transformation logic. We use our proprietary AI/ML capability as part of this process. The second stage involves the deployment of your cleansed business logic into your target platform. Again we use our AI/ML tool kit here to accelerate this process along with our data quality automation tools.

Data Analyst Automation.

We help automate key aspects of the Data Analyst function by initially analyzing multiple disparate data sets and scoring them for alignment.  We apply Natural Language Processing (NLP) on the attribute name and underlying value and score the outcomes. All of the relationships are catalogued with an inventory of aligned data for which to do Source to Target mapping. This is presented visually to the Analyst through our Analyst UI.  We cater for all data source types – file, message, queues, spreadsheets, unstructured data and relational databases; including our Snowflake Data Warehouse.[1] Once the Analyst is ready to sign-off a Source to Target Master, EXF Insights provides a fully documented and versioned specification including visualization and data ownership.

Intelligent Data Quality Automation.

Workflows are provided to not only to identify data quality issues but also to make AI/ML driven recommendations for intelligent automation correction to these problems . An example would be the identification of price breaks that arise from a Corporate Action split. In this example rules are provided to ensure that day over day price tolerance checks are included looking at Corporate Actions not just to report a price break, but also to return a Corporate Action alert message to operational teams.  Similarly, stale prices can be detected, and then secondary or tertiary data sources invoked to let Operations personnel know that another source was verified with recommendation to use.

Controls for Day Two Operations

We take Audit, Security and Controls seriously and are built for a ZeroTrust world.  EXF Insights uses the proven Cloud Control solution APPZ to provide scanned and secured images to the latest CIS standards, automate our DevOps and provide continuous monitoring to reduce CyberSecurity risk whether deployed in a Legacy, Private Cloud or Public Cloud.  All Code, Database, Network and Key and Secrets management are locked down and monitored for vulnerabilities and drift.  Automated alerts are generated for your cloud or our managed service operations team.

WHO WE ARE

Exafluence is a global firm led by a team with decades of expertise and experience in the financial services industry. We provide new cost-effective solutions across industrial device monitoring, IoT, healthcare and financial services.  As a managed service provider, we are happy to share our experiences and expertise to make you more successful.

Holley Holland offers practitioner-led consulting in business, digital and data technology change. This together with deep global sector client experience facilitates  scaled delivery at pace focused on business outcomes. Holley Holland offers a complete range of data and analytics services and covers the full end to end journey from helping you define your data & analytics strategy through to delivering on it.

Holley Holland and Exafluence work together in a trusted partnership. We believe that the unique combination of business and delivery expertise, coupled with the EXF Insights platform, brings you a powerful team to help you design  and deliver your data need for the future.

We love working with our clients to help them realise their short and long term goals, overcoming  challenges, and delivering lasting and sustainable solutions that achieve  their desired business outcomes.

To find out more visit us at http://exfinsights.com/req_demo.html  to slot in a demo of our EXF Insights solution.