Conclusion
Our research paints a clear narrative: Firms are navigating a complex but decisive journey toward data modernization, operational agility, and AI readiness.
While technological advancements offer immense promise, firms continue to grapple with entrenched challenges, from legacy infrastructure and integration bottlenecks to governance gaps and cultural inertia.
Firms increasingly embrace cloud adoption and outsourcing to managed service providers to scale efficiently and improve compliance. Yet, foundational tasks such as data migration and minimizing operational disruption remain significant hurdles. Manual data handling persists across operations, undermining consistency and control, prompting firms to invest in audit trails, regulatory tech, and unified dashboards to meet rising governance demands.
AI, while strategically prioritized for fraud detection, trading, and client services, has delivered mixed results. Higher-than-expected costs for some and underperformance have catalysed a shift toward explainability, structured retraining, and stakeholder collaboration supported by emerging AI governance frameworks.
Meanwhile, data transformation efforts are evolving beyond project-based models into organization-wide strategies built around product-oriented data ownership, ESG alignment, and self-service analytics.
System interoperability stands out as both a recurring obstacle and a pivotal transformation opportunity. Firms are evolving their data environments to prioritize usability, sharing, and transparency through centralized hubs, low-code tools, and intuitive access controls. They are also nurturing a data-literate culture, embedding accountability and insight-driven practices at every level.
Ultimately, the firms that succeed will be those that invest in foundational agility, embrace responsible innovation, and transform data into a trusted, accessible, and business-critical asset. As the industry evolves, these capabilities will not only ensure regulatory and operational resilience, but will also unlock the full potential of digital transformation—delivering intelligence at scale, across functions, and in real time.
“In other words, it’s all going very well—aside from the legacy tech, governance gaps, culture clashes, manual errors, spiralling AI costs, and the odd interoperability hiccup. But yes, almost sorted.”
Neil Vernon, Chief Product Officer, Gresham
