Increasing demands from regulators, investors and other stakeholders for stringent data management controls at financial institutions has helped ClusterSeven report record profits for 2012 – net income up over 40% year-on-year to over £0.4m on record turnover of over £3.3m. The specialist data management firm, which also won a record number of nine new clients for the year including major banks and insurers, helps financial institutions’ tax and finance teams manage and control their vast estates of Excel spreadsheets and similar databases.

Ralph Baxter, CEO at ClusterSeven, said: “We are entering a new phase in the debate about ‘Big Data’ as evidenced by statements from both the Financial Services Authority in the UK¹ and, in January this year, the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision². These are focused on how insurers and banks respectively manage and control their business-critical databases and spreadsheets. Last year saw regulators wake up to the fact that spreadsheets continue to be used extensively by all financial institutions and that the failure of many businesses to fully understand, control and monitor data held in spreadsheets leaves them – and their stakeholders – worryingly exposed to unacceptable risks.”

London- and New York-based ClusterSeven, which now has a third of the world’s top 30 banks as clients as well as a number of leadings insurers and asset managers³, has developed a range of market-leading software products that provide oversight and transparency of a firm’s databases and spreadsheets.

¹ Click here for Basel Committee pdf
² Click here for FSA pdf
³ Click here for a case study about BlackRock