Wealth management firm
simplifies audit preparationand gains data estatevisibility
St. James’s Place uses erwin® Data Intelligence by Quest® to automate datalineage, address regulatory compliance and tackle AI readiness.

Challenges

Industry: Finance – Wealth Management

St. James’s Place (SJP) needed a practical way tosee, document and understand the business context
of data sources all across their heterogeneous
data estate.

Website URL: sjp.co.uk

Solution

Country: United Kingdom

Since 1991, clients have put their trust in St.
James’s Place, one of the largest advice-led wealthmanagement firms in the UK. Having grown to nearlya million clients and £179 billion in funds undermanagement, SJP has enjoyed three decades oforganic growth. As they have grown, so has their data
estate, spanning a wide variety of technologies, with agreat deal of data moving among systems from manydifferent vendors.
With no easy way to see into and explain their data
landscape, SJP needed better support for regulatory
requirements and to be prepared for auditing.
They additionally wanted a toolkit to automatically
document change in their landscape. Their goal was
not only to quickly identify where data came from andaddress any problems at the source, but also to see
the potential upstream and downstream effects ofpending change.

The Chief Data Office at SJP took advantage of erwin
by Quest’s Value Attainment Program to extend
the value of erwin Data Intelligence at SJP. Moving
beyond an initial strategic reporting project, SJP
is evolving the software’s use to tackle regulatory
requirements for Consumer Duty reporting. Withautomated documentation of their data estate, thecompany is increasing visibility and governance toensure data is AI-ready.

Results or Benefits• Slashing time and effort to document their data
estate and data movement through automation• Saving days or weeks in regulatory audit response• Anticipating data quality issues earlier to
cut research time by half for customer andpartner inquiries• Improving data landscape visibility, understanding
and governance to ensure data is AI-ready• Maximizing the return on investment inerwin by Quest

The importance of data governance in finance“Our products are constructs of data,” says Ian
Peters, Divisional Director of Group Data Management at SJP. “We are not a paper-based business atall. The way we manage the business, all of our financial information, products and services exist within
our systems and applications as constructs of data.”
Data governance is an important concept for SJP,
driven by its requirement to hold high-quality, wellmanaged data is for its operations. It has also been
driven by the delivery of a mobile application for SJP
investors and the arrival of recent hires bringing new,external perspectives on artificial intelligence (AI).
Peters joined the Central Data Office and is creating a
new data governance framework to bring control anddirection across the organization.
“If your data isn’t right,” says Peters, “AI will deliver
sub-optimal results. That’s why one of our goals is tomake our data AI-ready. The other is to manage thedata that AI produces. It’s not only about the data thatAI consumes, but also about the data that it produces
and the predictions from an AI model that drive
decision making.”
SJP wanted to make sure they could understandthe why and where of conclusions generated byAI, and how to use the conclusions in operations.
They saw data lineage and data quality as integral
to that understanding and looked for the right tool toarrive at it.
They didn’t have to look far.

Using erwin Data Intelligence for data lineage
Already underway within SJP was its Strategic Client
Reporting project using erwin Data Intelligence as adata dictionary. The goal of the project was to identify
and document the source of all data going into thereports that the company sent out to clients.
On the surface, the project requirement was relatively
simple: to trace the one-hop lineage back to thesystem that was collating data from multiple sources.
But it became obvious that erwin Data Intelligence

2could do a lot more and that SJP could get a lot morefrom their investment in the product.
“We weren’t using the automation features in erwin
Data Intelligence for scanning metadata,” says Peters.
“We hadn’t taken a close look at the other tasks
the tool could accomplish for us. Take the businessglossary, for example. Given any business term, what
do we mean when we use it? How does the term
relate to our data? And, what is our source for the datathat corresponds to that term?”
SJP looked at the Strategic Client Reporting projectand saw an implementation of erwin Data Intelligencearound a very specific project and outcome. But
the project took advantage of only a fraction of thetotal capability of the software, so Peters and his
team sought ways to extract more return on theirinvestment.

Documenting Consumer Duty
reporting with erwin
erwin by Quest’s Value Attainment Program
includes a method for exploring how customers
are currently using erwin solutions and discovering ways to get more out of them. While embarking
on the program with the erwin sales and services
team, SJP also appointed a head of data intelligence to promote erwin throughout the organization.
The effort led to applying erwin Data Intelligence toSJP’s requirement to report on Consumer Duty.
“Consumer Duty is a regulatory requirement imposedon financial services companies to avoid bringing
harm to clients,” says Peters. “It calls for reportingthat cuts a wide swath through our entire business,covering data domains such as clients, partners,finance and investments. We now use erwin todocument our reporting, which in turn will enable
auditing all the way back to the source of the data.”
With erwin, SJP defines business terms and picks
out the data elements that go into them. For any termor element, they will be able to follow the lineage
back to the point in the organization where the data
originates. Based on that information, they can thenbuild rules to ensure quality at every point along thedata path, from source to report.

“Pulling data from so many different domains forConsumer Duty also allows us to change ourconversation with the data stewards,” Peters explains.
“As we build out our data governance effort, insteadof going vertically and starting from scratch withineach domain, we can go horizontally. We can say tothe stewards, ‘We’ve already incorporated fifty of yourdata elements as part of the Consumer Duty work.
Now we’ll incorporate the last few and you’ll be done.’
This horizontal approach is our way of extending theuse of erwin Data Intelligence and advancing datagovernance more quickly to all the data elements inthe business.”“erwin Data Intelligence is morethan a reference library. It’s aliving, breathing capability thatwill allow us to manage our data
estate much more effectively inthe future.

”

Ian Peters, Divisional Director of Group Data Management,
St. James’s Place

How automation tames aheterogeneous data landscape

SJP manages their data on a variety of platforms andapplications. Their complement of tools for ETL andreporting includes Matillion, Mulesoft, Talend, PowerBI, Tableau, Python, Snowflake, Tableau and SQLServer Integration Services (SSIS).
Given that heterogeneous mix, it’s important for SJP
to automate the harvesting and management of their
metadata. They use erwin Standard Data Connectors
to auto-ingest or automate the harvesting of metadatafrom data-at-rest platforms. They also use erwin Smart
Data Connectors to capture data in motion and datatransformations between platforms.
The savings in manual labor alone are huge. “Wewould truly struggle if we didn’t have the connectors
to accurately document the structure of our databases
in erwin,” says Peters. “We’ve done loads of scanning3with erwin Standard Data Connectors, and the
documentation output from them is brilliant. We value
them because, even if you’re documenting a single
system in isolation, the connectors do it for you. The
main benefit is that erwin Data Connectors allow us
to do something that, were it not for automation, wewouldn’t even consider doing. erwin saves us trying
to work it out manually. It’s really as simple as that.”

The business value of anticipating audits anddata quality problems
The result will be deep insight into SJP’s heterogeneous data estate. They will have what theyneed for impact analysis to quickly assess pending change. They will be able to get to the root
cause of data quality problems much faster thanthey ever could. They consider it a huge advantage to be able to see what’s happening in thedata before it goes outside to their clients.
“We spend a lot of time researching and responding
to queries from partners and clients,” Peters notes.
“Anticipating data quality problems instead of reacting
to them will cut that time. It’s difficult to put a figure
on it, but it’s conceivable to reduce costs in that area
alone by about half.”And, in anticipation of audits, SJP has created anobject in erwin called the Key Risk Indicator. From anerwin report, they can drill into the object to see thesource of all the data behind it, including how the data
has been coded.
“The real business value of erwin is that we now
have an important safeguard when our data needs
to be audited and checked,” says Peters. “That will
enable us to save days or weeks in responding to arequest for, say, a Consumer Duty audit. That’s a hugebenefit for us. Our biggest realization is that erwin
Data Intelligence is more than a reference library. It’s
not just a one-and-done, sit-on-the-shelf software
package to install. It’s a living, breathing capability
that will allow us to manage our data estate much
more effectively in the future. Our evolution with thisproduct is ongoing.”

“The real business value of erwin
is that we now have an importantsafeguard when our data needs
to be audited and checked. That
will enable us to save days orweeks in responding to a request
for, say, a Consumer Duty audit.
That’s a huge benefit for us.

”

About Quest
Quest creates software solutions that make thebenefits of new technology real in an increasingly
complex IT landscape. From database and systems
management, to Active Directory and Microsoft 365
migration and management, and cybersecurity
resilience, Quest helps customers solve their next
IT challenge now. Quest Software. Where next
meets now.

Ian Peters, Divisional Director of Group Data Management,
St. James’s PlacePRODUCTS AND SERVICESProducts• erwin Data Intelligence• erwin Standard Data Connectors• erwin Smart Data Connectors

Solutions• Metadata Management• Data Governance

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