Financial services firms face a challenging business environment. While the overall economy has improved, the internal and external forces impacting performance remain as tough as ever. In the face of these enormous business pressures, financial services firms need to deploy their assets and resources intelligently. Among the most important, yet under-leveraged assets, in a financial institution are the data residing in its systems.

This paper discusses common barriers to integrating data in financial services, the shift towards enterprise-wide data integration, essential business and IT requirements, and keys to successfully instituting an integration strategy.