Building a Business Case for a Product Master

A business case should provide a clear articulation of the strategic objectives and the pain points the Product Master will address. It's essential to quantify the benefits in terms of risk reduction, cost savings, compliance improvements and revenue enhancement. Highlight how a consistent data model and single source of truth can serve as a catalyst for data-driven decision-making, offering a competitive edge and facilitating compliance with ever-evolving regulatory requirements.

While every firm’s needs are different, there tend to be some common benefits and challenges.

Benefits

1. Robust Regulatory Reporting: Streamlines processes, ensuring accuracy and timeliness that meet regulatory standards.
2. Operational Efficiency: Minimises manual reconciliations, reducing errors and operational costs.
3. Risk Management: Facilitates a unified risk management approach, enhancing visibility and control.
4. Enhanced Financial and Strategic Analysis: Consolidation into a single source of truth eradicates the inefficiencies of disparate spreadsheets, fostering more informed decision-making.

Challenges

1. Cost: There is a definite up-front cost, with nebulous potential cost benefits in the longer term.
2. Administrative Burden: Establishing and maintaining a Product Master requires significant up-front effort and resources.
3. Cultural Adoption: Transitioning to a centralised data management system may face resistance due to unfamiliarity.
4. Organisation Structure: Protracted delays, or worse, vacuums can occur when changes to the organisation structure are required.
5. Integration Complexity: Merging various data sources into one can be daunting and resource intensive.

Mitigating Actions

When presenting the business case, it is worth noting some actions to mitigate the drawbacks, these are:

1. Cost Reduction: If possible, emphasise any cost reduction from operational efficiency
2. Stakeholder Management: Emphasise the strategic and operational benefits to key stakeholders, showcasing the impact on the business's bottom line and competitive positioning.
3. Embrace a Consolidated View: Highlight the elimination of siloed data and the move towards a single source of truth as a way to remove or reduce integration complexity in the medium term.
4. Change Management: Plan to address cultural and adoption challenges by focusing on training, communication, and potentially demonstrating quick wins to foster buy-in.

Conclusion

Engage key stakeholders early, for example, the Head of Product, COO, and Head of Data are obviously crucial for championing the initiative. It may be worth thinking laterally and seeking a chorus from other impacted stakeholders, for example, Finance, Strategy, Fund or Regulatory Reporting, Investment Risk, Performance, and a myriad of operational teams. Their insights can help refine the strategy, ensuring it aligns with broader business goals and addresses specific operational challenges.