Turn the pages of virtually any major financial-services regulatory document, and the word "data" features highly. Banks, capital markets and other institutions are tasked with collecting, calculating and submitting hundreds of thousands, and possibly milllions, of data points a month to regulators, with serious consequences for any errors or misleading conclusions.

Not ony must reports be accurate, comprehensive and in a specified format, but, increasingly, regulators are demanding evidence of the source, or "traceability", of the data to verify its credibility. Satisfying these various requirements is a major headache, especially for those organizations with complex structures and disparate systems, where data is typically stored in a range of formats and must be pulled together manually.

Data insights: Regulation's silver lining