Metaphor: Empowering Financial Compliance in the Age of Data Regulation

Insurance providers, reinsurers, and pension funds face an increasingly complex regulatory environment. The European Insurance and Occupational Pensions Authority (EIOPA) stands at the forefront of this regulatory framework, safeguarding the stability and transparency of the insurance and pensions markets. Regulatory compliance is not just a necessity—it's a cornerstone of trust and stability. Metaphor, the Modern Metadata Platform, offers comprehensive features designed to help you address these regulatory challenges effectively.

Understanding EIOPA's Data Management Requirements

EIOPA's primary objectives include fostering financial stability, ensuring market transparency, and protecting the interests of policyholders and beneficiaries. Central to achieving these goals is a strong emphasis on data quality and management, as outlined in Articles 19 and 231 of the EIOPA regulation.

These articles establish rigorous standards for data used in calculating technical provisions and internal models. Key requirements stipulate that data must be:

1. Complete: Incorporating sufficient historical information to assess risk characteristics and identify trends.
2. Accurate: Free from material errors and demonstrating consistency across time periods.
3. Appropriate: Aligned with intended use and accurately reflecting underlying risks.

Enhancing Data Governance for Regulatory Compliance

Financial organizations are drowning in data. From actuarial calculations to risk assessments, every decision relies on vast amounts of information. But it's not just about having data—it's about having the right data, at the right time, with the right quality.

For many organizations, meeting these standards presents significant operational and technological challenges.

Metaphor is built to help you address these challenges, making it easy and intuitive to effectively align your data governance initiatives and organizational goals within the regulatory framework.

Let's examine some way that Metaphor can help you directly address EIOPA's requirements:

1. Ensuring Data Completeness & Visibility

Metaphor's end-to-end table and column-level lineage feature is a game-changer. It allows team members to trace the origin and journey of every piece of data, offering granularity at the field or column level. With this comprehensive view, identifying gaps in historical data or missing risk factors is not just possible but also easily accessible. Metaphor’s lineage feature provides transparency into data flows, but also visibility into how data changes can impact team members across the organization.

2. Guaranteeing Data Accuracy

Accuracy is non-negotiable, and Metaphor's robust search and documentation features make it achievable. Team members can quickly locate and verify data sources, spot inconsistencies, and maintain a clear visibility into data across platforms. With powerful features like coverage metrics, which provides analytics on data initiatives, Metaphor enables data governance capabilities across use cases like search and data curation.

3. Democratizing Access & Fostering Transparency

Metaphor's natural language search is like having a data scientist at your fingertips. It helps technical and business team members find exactly the data they need, ensuring it aligns perfectly with actuarial and statistical models. Social features foster collaboration, allowing experts to share insights and validate data usage across the organization. Additionally, the regulation emphasizes documented processes in data management. Metaphor’s robust documentation tools extend far beyond the catalog to ensure that no knowledge is lost, but easily captured and accessible for posterity. There features enables criteria such as

• Transparent documentation of data policies, guides, usage, and others
• Collaborative development and review of data related documentation
• Readily searchable and easy dissemination of contextual data knowledge and insights

4. Staying Ahead of Data Changes

To maintain data accuracy and timeliness, Metaphor's notification system keeps your team abreast of changes to data across all data platforms.

• Scheduled and ad-hoc data updates and refreshes
• Changes in data sources or methodologies
• Potential data quality issues requiring attention

5. Precision in Data Selection

When calculating technical provisions or running internal models, precision is key. Metaphor's advanced search capabilities allow you to:

• Pinpoint exact datasets needed for specific risk assessments
• Filter and organize data based on usage or quality metrics and relevance
• Immediately awareness into the quality of the data and trust its fitness for purpose

Beyond Compliance: A Culture of Data Excellence

While Metaphor excels at meeting these regulatory requirements, its impact goes far beyond compliance. It fosters a culture of data literacy and collaboration, and provides a comprehensive solution for organizations looking to transform their approach to regulatory adherence and data-driven business growth. Our browser extension and Slack integration weave data awareness into daily workflows, and help bring data to everyone in the organization, wherever they are. Suddenly, everyone from underwriters to C-suite executives is speaking the same data language.

This cultural shift doesn't just satisfy regulators and auditors—it drives innovation, improves risk assessment, and ultimately leads to better products and services for policyholders, stakeholders, and customers. By implementing Metaphor, organizations can:

• Cultivate a data-driven decision-making culture
• Enhance risk assessment and management capabilities
• Accelerate innovation in product development and customer service delivery

Learn more about how Metaphor can empower your journey towards regulatory excellence and enhanced data management.

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About Metaphor

The Metaphor Metadata Platform represents the next evolution of the Data Catalog - it combines best in class Technical Metadata (learnt from building DataHub at LinkedIn) with Behavioral and Social Metadata. It supercharges an organization’s ability to democratize data with state of the art capabilities for Data Governance, Data Literacy and Data Enablement, and provides an extremely intuitive user interface that turns even the most non-technical user into a fan of the catalog. See Metaphor in action today!