CASE STUDY - Mortgage Company Drives Compliance with Data Governance
- By Daniel Teachey
- October 18, 2007
Commentary by Daniel Teachey, Director of Corporate Communications, DataFlux
The Business
A company that purchases, securitizes, and invests in the secondary mortgage market—having financed, since its inception, tens of millions of homes—faced a new round of regulatory pressures. Due to recent increases in scrutiny from regulatory agencies, it was relying on outmoded technology and processes to attempt to meet compliance requirements. This company saw an enterprise-wide data governance solution as the only real answer to these challenges.
The Challenge
Increased scrutiny and new regulatory requirements, such as the Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) legislation, have only added to the compliance burden for mortgage companies. Like any financial institution, these organizations were already competing in a heavily regulated industry.
Faced with new regulatory challenges, the company found that it did not have either the technology or processes in place to implement a comprehensive data governance program. In the past, separate lines of business within the company were individually responsible for their own data quality. Each unit would work directly with the corporate IT division, creating data quality rules, which would then be implemented on each application or data source by IT.
This process had a historically slow turnaround time, with changes to the rules taking weeks or months to be implemented. Plus, the business analysts who depended on the data had very little control over it.
Seeking a system with faster implementation times that could produce more reliable data—and that would place control of data quality in the hands of business analysts— the company turned to DataFlux.
The DataFlux Solution
The company chose DataFlux dfPower Studio and the DataFlux Integration Server to help it meets its compliance goals. By profiling their data using dfPower Studio, the company was able to seek out and correct erroneous or duplicate data to ensure that their data governance initiatives focused on the most troublesome data sources. Through statistical and numeric range analysis, business analysts verified that key metrics, such as loan-to-value ratios or total unpaid balances, fell within federally mandated acceptable ranges.
Using dfPower Studio, the company’s business analysts were able to work separately from the IT department to develop their own business rules for data governance. Once the initial data profiling had been performed, analysts were able to use dfPower Studio to transform the findings from the profiling into actionable business rules, then establish these rules as ongoing data monitoring routines and deploy them as real-time services using the DataFlux Integration Server.
The Results
The company is now much more confident about its quarterly and annual financial reports because it is confident that its federally mandated reporting is built on high-quality data. Instead of multiple divisions having separate data quality rules, the company now has one source for data governance rules across all applications and data sources, resulting in a unified, accurate view of corporate data.
Putting data quality in the hands of the business users also allowed the company to reduce the time needed to implement data quality initiatives. Implementation times went from months to just a few hours. Because dfPower Studio uses an intuitive interface to build rules for data governance efforts, business users could act independently to analyze the data and establish real-time controls. With business users controlling data, the company gained greater flexibility to respond to changes and meet challenges as they arose.
By making data governance an ongoing part of its operations, this mortgage company is certain that it has the people, processes, and technology in place to be compliant with SOX. Furthermore, because of the adaptability of the DataFlux solution, the company also has the confidence that it will be able to meet any changing regulatory obligations in the future.
This article originally appeared in the issue of .