Future-Proofing Investments with Soda

The story of Soda with NN Investment Partners (NN IP) takes place in the Netherlands. NN IP is an active manager for institutional and wholesale investors around the world, with 1,000 employees managing 300 billion of assets across 37 countries.

The Challenge

Back in 2018 the data governance team at NN IP, responsible for data quality, dataset certification and steward training, encountered a range of data quality issues as their data volume, variety, and sources grew -- at a time where Data quality became a C-suite priority in order to meet external regulatory and stakeholder reporting requirements for governance, risk, and compliance. The team recognized something needed to change.. How could they better support the business with consistent data, meet compliance and governance obligations, democratize data access for the business, to eventually enable competitive differentiation? They decided to review their processes related to data quality management - and quickly came to the conclusion they would need to move to a self-service operating model using a modern platform.

The Solution

Recognizing the need for a next-generation, self-service tool, the team evaluated various solutions and selected Soda Cloud based on the mutual commitment to three key principles:

1. All teams should have control over data quality
2. Business expectations should inform reliable metrics
3. Transparency is an essential part of trust and use of the available data sets

With Soda Cloud, the data governance team developed a user-first data quality approach that begins with profiling and discovering of the data to uncover business rules. Each record is thoroughly tested for accuracy, and structural issues are addressed through remediation, with monitoring in place to keep all datasets fit for purpose. Today, the organization utilizes the capabilities of Soda Cloud for a variety of use cases beyond monitoring and improving the quality of data in the API store. This includes mapping existing data items to new reporting items to ensure compliance with CDE guidelines, as well as normalizing and mapping data for ESG reporting. The technology stack powering this process includes Soda Cloud for data quality, Collibra for data governance, ServiceNow for incident management and Power BI for dashboards and metrics.