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Understanding the business of Data Archiving Solutions in Banking

Updated On : April 2017

Finance is an excessively regulated industry. There are a lot of moving parts and data that must be monitored and reported in order to stay protected and compliant with all the regulations. One of the most important aspects of regulatory compliance for banks and financial organizations is record keeping and archiving electronic communication data. With the growth of business, the amount of data also grows continuously over time. In addition, databases expand when new functionalities are introduced, mergers or acquisitions take place or when one upgrades to a newer version of a software. The system becomes redundant and a backup of all the data needs to be taken. This can result in the need for additional hardware. Slowdown of systems is a further consequence of large volumes of data. Another disadvantage of too much data is the time required to restore a mission critical backup.

Brokers, dealers, investment advisors, lending agents, futures and transfer agents, and businesses like mortgage companies, credit unions, banks, hedge funds, private equity firms, exchanges, commercial and retail banks, lenders and insurers, payday lenders, foreclosure relief services and debt collectors are all required to capture, monitor and archive business related communication data for review, audits, eDiscovery, litigation, and compliance.

An archival solution is a great first step. Data archival and retrieval solutions automatically help prepare responses to any compliance audit, litigation or information request for business communication data. The right solution archives all communication data in one central location for easy search, eDiscovery, and exporting needs. All transactional data, master and reference data as well as metadata is stored.

In simpler terms, data archiving is the process of moving data that is no longer actively used to a separate storage device for long-term retention. Archived data consists of older data that is still important to the organization (like the data locked when you retire legacy systems) and may be needed for future reference, as well as data that must be retained for regulatory compliance. Data archives are indexed and have search capabilities so files and parts of files can be easily located and retrieved.

Benefits of archiving data

• The most important reason to archive business and transaction data is that banking business is regulated and thus, mandated to do so.
• Another reason to archive is data leakage. If there is proprietary data, customer account, transactional or confidential information, it is important to make sure that it isn't shared, either purposefully or accidentally.
• Having an archiving solution gives oversight by guarding against insider trading, inappropriate financial advice, and stating personal beliefs about a financial investment or trade as fact. This oversight lets employees know that according to the policy, every transaction is being stored and can be accessed for review.
• Products like Finacle Archival Solutions also provide data monitoring, filtering, and read only access. This gives another level of protection, by preventing inappropriate, sensitive, proprietary or other types of content from ever being accessed or modified. It can even alert managers or compliance officers of inappropriate or illegal usage. This is necessary in a heavily regulated environment.
• Another great reason to archive is to increase business productivity. The ever-growing amount of content being stored on servers, causes them to slow down, and could cause them to go offline completely, which reduces productivity. Data archiving solutions like Finacle data archival help improve system performance, and reduces downtime by allowing to delete data from the live system once they have been archived.
• A good data archiving solution can reduce the strain on the IT staff. End users can be empowered to access the archive instead of bothering the IT department to spend needless hours searching and recovering data.
• Archiving is also extremely important for eDiscovery, information requests, and litigation preparation.
• Finally, an archive is an untapped source of business insight. If there is access to historic data stretching over decades, there is a mass of information that is available at the fingertips. Actionable business insights are also the future of archiving.

While there are many archiving solutions, FinDART is a customised data archival and reporting solution for banks and financial institutions. The need of an archival solution arises due to migration or to retire legacy systems. FinDART -

• handles archival from retired / migrated applications
• supports data purging
• provides standard reports, MIS, user logs
• facilitates queries on archived data