As regulatory obligations expand and distribution models become more complex, financial firms are increasingly constrained not by a lack of data, but by how that data is managed.
Across asset managers, insurers, REITs, and other investment firms, fund and product data are often fragmented across administrators, custodians, vendors, and internal systems. Each source may be accurate in isolation, yet inconsistencies arise as data is transformed, reconciled, and reused. Over time, this fragmentation undermines reporting quality, increases operational risk, and limits scalability.
Establishing a golden source of fund data is widely recognized as the solution. In practice, however, implementing one is challenging.
Why fragmentation persists
Data ecosystems rarely evolve intentionally. They grow as new products, jurisdictions, regulations, and service providers are added. The result is multiple partial sources of truth, manual reconciliation, and limited transparency into how data is used across reporting processes.
These issues are particularly visible in regulatory reporting, where disclosures such as PRIIPs KIDs, EPTs, and other jurisdiction-specific reports must be consistent, traceable, and reproducible. When data quality is addressed late in the process, reporting teams spend more time validating outputs than delivering them.
What a golden source actually requires
A common misconception is that a golden source is only a single system that replaces all others. In reality, a broad ecosystem of upstream and downstream platforms, including administrators, custodians, data vendors, and internal systems continue to coexist.
The objective is not consolidation for its own sake, but integration and governance. A golden source must be able to ingest data from multiple origins, normalize it into a consistent structure, apply validation and reconciliation, and then distribute it reliably across regulatory and business use cases.
A practical, integration-led approach
At iQuant, the platform is designed to integrate with a wide range of systems commonly used by asset managers, insurers, and other financial institutions. Upstream integrations support the ingestion and normalization of client data from administrators, vendors, and internal sources.
Downstream, data dissemination is driven by client-specific reporting and distribution requirements rather than a fixed list of supported systems. This allows firms to distribute data flexibly to regulators, distributors, internal platforms, and service providers while maintaining a consistent internal data foundation.
Once data is onboarded, it is standardized within a unified framework, with validation controls applied at ingestion. Reporting logic and narrative content are managed centrally within the platform, with direct control available to authorized users. This ensures disclosures are generated consistently from the same underlying data set, while allowing firms to govern calculations, assumptions, and narrative language across products and jurisdictions.
This approach supports not only regulatory reporting, but also internal reporting, client reporting, and sales enablement, without duplicating data or introducing reconciliation risk.
Governance and scalability by design
A golden source is only effective if it can scale. As reporting volumes increase and requirements evolve, firms need clear data lineage, version control, and the ability to incorporate new data points and sources without re-architecting their environment.
The iQuant data framework is intentionally flexible, allowing new data attributes, calculations, and disclosure requirements to be introduced as regulations, products, and distribution models change. Governance is embedded through standardized structures, validation rules, and controlled user access, ensuring scalability does not come at the expense of data integrity or oversight.
Connecting data foundations to time to market
In our recent post on enabling time to market through integrated data and reporting, we discussed how operational readiness directly affects the ability to launch products and support distribution timelines. A well-implemented golden source of fund data is what makes that readiness possible.
When data integrity, validation, and reconciliation are handled centrally, reporting becomes more predictable, and timelines compress naturally, without compromising accuracy or control.
Contact us to discuss how to implement a golden source of fund data, or see how the iQuant platform supports this in practice.
