Data Compliance Management in Financial Services: Your Complete Guide in 2025

Updated January 31st, 2025

Share this article

Data compliance management in financial services ensures the secure handling of sensitive data, mitigating legal risks and protecting customer privacy. It also helps in building trust by demonstrating a commitment to responsible data management practices.
See How Atlan Simplifies Data Governance – Start Product Tour

This article will explore the role of data compliance management in financial services and how to implement it effectively.


Table of Contents #

  1. What is data compliance management in financial services?
  2. Why do you need data compliance management in financial services?
  3. Who is responsible for data compliance management in financial services?
  4. How to tackle data compliance management in financial services
  5. Implementing data compliance management in financial services: Core capabilities
  6. Summing up
  7. Data compliance management in financial services: Related reads

What is data compliance management in financial services? #

Data compliance management in financial services involves establishing systems, policies, and procedures that ensure sensitive data is handled securely and ethically, in alignment with regulations such as GDPR, CCPA, PCI DSS, GLBA, and SOX.

Non-compliance can result in severe financial penalties, intense public scrutiny, disrupted operations, and an inability to respond effectively to market changes.

For instance, if a finserv enterprise is found in breach of compliance regulations, then it will have to divert resources away from innovation and delay critical business decisions to deal with the compliance breach. Over time, such challenges can harm its ability to maintain competitiveness and credibility.

Beyond avoiding fines, compliance is about maintaining business continuity and competitiveness. For example, finserv enterprises looking to expand internationally must demonstrate strong data compliance practices to meet regional regulations like Europe’s GDPR.


Why do you need data compliance management in financial services? #

A key goal for financial services enterprises is to ensure the data they own is trustworthy, as this directly influences decision-making and drives critical business outcomes.

Trustworthy data enables organizations to make informed, data-driven decisions that lead to greater revenue, as accurate insights help tailor services and products to meet customer needs. It also fosters a deeper understanding of customers, enabling firms to align their offerings with customer preferences, ultimately enhancing customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Over time, as businesses use reliable data for strategic planning, they gain a competitive advantage that helps them increase their market share.

Key regulations shaping data compliance #


We all know a three-letter institution that would levy a large fine if we were careless with our information. So, it was really important to start thinking about that pretty heavily, especially as our warehouse evolved.” - Adam Rosenbaum, Data Governance Analyst at Sands Capital

As financial services enterprises operate under a complex and ever-evolving regulatory landscape, understanding key regulations for the industry is vital. These include:

Also, read → Financial data governance 101


Who is responsible for data compliance management in financial services? #

Data compliance management in financial services is a collective responsibility requiring seamless collaboration among various organizational roles. Here’s a closer look at the key players responsible for ensuring compliance:

  • Compliance officers: They craft data policies, establish reporting protocols, and ensure regulatory adherence.
  • IT teams: Deploy secure data systems, implement firewalls, and monitor activity.
  • Data stewards: Validate data accuracy, set up and oversee the enforcement of governance policies.
  • Legal and audit teams: Interpret regulations, oversee audits, and ensure compliance.

While this is a general list of roles and responsibilities, each organization is unique and as such, these roles might encompass distinct responsibilities depending on factors such as company size, industry regulations, data governance maturity, and the complexity of the data ecosystem.

Some organizations may consolidate multiple responsibilities into a single role, while others may distribute them across specialized teams. Additionally, evolving compliance requirements, business priorities, and technology advancements can further shape how these roles function within an enterprise.


How to tackle data compliance management in financial services #

Tackling data compliance management in financial services companies requires:

  1. Evaluating the data estate for compliance requirements, gaps, and improvements
  2. Establishing a single source of truth facilitating a common understanding of compliance requirements
  3. Leveraging automation for achieving data compliance management at scale

1. Evaluating the data estate for compliance gaps and improvements #


The first step to tackling data compliance management in financial services is to identify relevant regulations to understand compliance requirements. Then comes a thorough evaluation of your data estate to understand current practices, spot compliance gaps, and explore ways to deal with those gaps.

For Tide, a UK-based digital bank, the challenge was improving their compliance with GDPR’s Right to Erasure, commonly known as the “Right to be forgotten.”

Our production support team had a script, and whenever someone wanted to delete data, they would go through our back-end databases and delete personal data fields.” - Hendrik Brackmann, VP of Data at Tide

This process didn’t capture data from new sources, which had to be found and manually deleted by Tide’s data team. As their technology stack and architecture grew more complicated, new products and services were introduced, and customers increased over time. This made GDPR compliance more cumbersome and time-consuming.

Complicating this challenge was a lack of shared definitions of personal data, with differing opinions on what constituted PII across organizations (from Legal to IT). So, completing the “Right to be forgotten” process also involved frequently re-litigating definitions.

2. Establishing a single source of truth for facilitating a common understanding of compliance requirements #


Creating a central hub for compliance policies and data ensures clarity and efficiency, while improving regulatory compliance. Let’s look at case studies from Tide and Porto to understand why.

For Tide, getting complete context on each data asset was a challenge. Sometimes, mere column names would serve as definitions. However, in many instances, these weren’t precise enough.

That’s why Tide’s journey to data compliance management began with establishing a single source of truth for personal data.

We said: Okay, our source of truth for personal data is Atlan. We were blessed by Legal. Everyone, from now on, could start to understand personal data.” - Michal Szymanski, Tide’s Data Governance Manager

Brazilian financial giant Porto embarked on a similar journey to improve their compliance efforts by setting up Datapedia – a single pane of glass to discover, understand, and apply Porto’s data.

Read more How Porto built more than just a data catalog

3. Leveraging automation for achieving data compliance management in financial services at scale #


According to a 2006 HBR article on Sarbanes-Oxley, if you “ask most auditors what the weakest aspect of internal control is, they’ll tell you – manual processes.”

This holds true even in 2025. For Tide, GDPR compliance meant making automating the entire ‘right to erasure’ workflow a priority.

Tide’s team estimated that properly tagging personally identifiable data, and adding their newly determined definitions would take roughly 50 days of intense manual effort. The team had to be precise, searching and tagging location-by-location.

However, by leveraging intelligent automation, Tide could automatically identify, tag, and secure personal data with a single workflow in merely a few hours.

Read more Tide’s story of GDPR compliance

Another example is that of North, a leading payments solution provider. North wanted to apply Snowflake’s DDM (Dynamic Data Masking) to its sensitive assets. This would involve painstakingly locating these assets and then individually tagging them across a 225,000-asset landscape – a time-consuming and potentially error-prone process.

North used intelligent automation to identify thousands of assets and automatically applied tags and masking policies.

How do you find and tag thousands of assets? You don’t Google it, you Atlan it. By the time I added a filter, Atlan scanned our 225,000 assets and almost immediately found 45 matches. As I changed the filters to add new ones, it constantly updated to show me how many assets meet that criteria.” - Daniel Dowdy, Vice President, Data Analytics & Governance

Read more How North drove millions in value by governing Snowflake with Atlan


Implementing data compliance management in financial services: Core capabilities #

The best way to build a common understanding of data compliance requirements and automate compliance management at scale is to invest in a comprehensive data governance platform.

Think of it as a single control plane for your entire data and AI stack, with essential capabilities, such as:

  1. Active metadata management that automates metadata enrichment across your landscape
  2. Automated, cross-system, column-level data lineage mapping that tracks data origins and transformations, simplifying audits and root-cause analysis
  3. Data tagging and classification to automatically identify and classify sensitive data across the organization
  4. Personalized access control and identity management, according to user roles, personas, data domains, or projects to manage who can view, edit, or delete data
  5. A unified policy manager and transparency center offering a real-time view of policy coverage, incidents, and breaches
  6. Automated reporting and audits aligned with finserv regulations
  7. A comprehensive business glossary establishing connections between data, definitions, and domains, which mimic how your business works
  8. Data contracts that define clear agreements between data producers and consumers

Summing up #

Data compliance management in financial services is about building trust, ensuring operational efficiency, and enabling innovation. As regulatory landscapes evolve, firms that embrace proactive compliance strategies will gain a competitive edge, reducing risks while enhancing customer confidence.

For example, Tide automated its GDPR compliance workflows, reducing manual efforts from 50 days to just a few hours—freeing up valuable resources while ensuring regulatory adherence. Similarly, North, a leading payments provider, used automation to identify and tag thousands of sensitive assets instantly, strengthening data security while simplifying audits.

By adopting a unified approach to compliance—leveraging automation, centralizing policy management, and ensuring clear governance—financial services companies can transform compliance from a burden into a strategic advantage.



Share this article

[Website env: production]