Fragmented product data is a hidden cost in financial services

Banks, insurers and advisory networks today have their product data everywhere. In the core system, in CRM, in spreadsheets, in the mobile app, on the web portal, in the branch system. But “everywhere” doesn’t mean “available and consistent.”

Fragmented product data is one of the least visible but most expensive problems in financial institutions. You don’t see it in reports until someone needs to change or launch something fast. And that is happening more often. Driven by regulation, competition, and the pressure for faster product cycles.

How it got this way

Fragmented product data is the result of twenty years of gradual digitization. Core system, web, internet banking, mobile app, CRM. Each new channel needed product data and started managing it on its own, because there was no central place to pull it from.

The outcome is a situation where product data lives in dozens of places at once, in different formats, with different levels of freshness. (We’ve covered how this plays out across roles inside the company in an earlier article on threats in product management.)

Five places where it hurts the most

Inconsistent data across channels. A customer sees a 4.2% interest rate on the website. They walk into a branch and the advisor quotes 4.0%. They call the hotline and get a third number. This isn’t just customer frustration. It’s a reputational and regulatory risk. And for financial products, both carry weight. When internal audit or the regulator asks which rules produced which rate on which date, the answer is scattered across five systems and three spreadsheets.

Slow response to change. The bank adjusts a product’s terms. The change has to be made in each system separately. Different people, different teams, no central coordination. The change reaches all channels at different times. In the meantime, someone sells the product on the old terms and the transaction has to be tracked down and corrected after the fact. The same problem applies to post-launch optimization. When you want to test the market and iterate on an offer, every small adjustment becomes a project.

Product knowledge lives in people’s heads, not in systems. When product parameters, exceptions, and historical dependencies live fragmented across systems, the only place a complete picture exists is in someone’s head. Onboarding a new colleague takes months. When a key person leaves, part of the product memory leaves with them. And when you want to check on a single meeting how a specific product is reported, sold, approved, and managed across the company, you have to invite ten people, because each only knows their own slice.

Legacy portfolio nobody cleans up. A bank actively sells five types of current accounts. But it has a hundred in its systems. Most without new customers, some kept alive just for a handful of existing contracts. Nobody dares clean them up. When product logic lives in dozens of systems, nobody can say with confidence what depends on what and what would break if you removed it. Operational complexity keeps growing, even though no one actively wanted it.

Cross-sell across the group stays theoretical. Financial groups want to offer products across the whole group (the bank, the insurer, the pension fund, the advisory network). Bundling, combined offers, a consistent customer experience. But each subsidiary manages its products in its own systems, by its own rules, in a different format. Group-level cross-sell then gets decided in presentations, not in systems.

Why it’s more urgent now than before

Traditional institutions carry the historical debt of twenty years of digitization. Fintechs and digital-first banks don’t. They build on a green field, with a clean architecture where a single source of truth for products is baked in from day one. When a new offer comes, they don’t rewrite it into five systems. When a rate changes, it distributes itself. When they want to combine products across brands, they have the means to do so.

The flexibility gap starts to show where decisions about the customer happen. Not in the size of the branch network, but in how quickly the company can react.

What can be done

The solution doesn’t require rewriting the core system. It’s a separate layer above it. A central product catalog that acts as a single source of truth for all channels (your own and your partners’) and that decouples product logic from the core architecture.

The product is defined once. All channels draw from the same source. A change in terms propagates everywhere at once, without manual coordination between teams. Launching a new product means one entry, not five parallel ones. For financial institutions, the key is that product changes are made by the business itself, following clear rules, without development and without touching the core system.

Pricing and product terms are configured through a unified logic that can be audited. When the regulator or internal audit asks which rules produced which rate on which date, the answer is traceable in one place.

The outcome is not just technical consistency. It’s the ability to react quickly. To the market, to the competition, to the regulator. Without every change triggering a coordination project across departments. 

If you’re working through something similar and want an outside perspective, we’re happy to talk. No strings attached.