Every new financial year begins with intent. Growth plans are sharpened. Risk thresholds are revisited. Compliance calendars are aligned. Yet beneath all of this sits a quieter, structural question: Is our data strong enough to support the year ahead?

For many organisations, that question is more urgent than it appears.

Data today flows through multiple ERPs, procurement platforms, tax systems, CRMs, and legacy databases. Vendor records are duplicated. GST numbers are outdated. Bank details are inconsistent. Customer profiles differ across systems. Individually, these seem like operational irritants. Collectively, they become financial and compliance risks.

A 2025 report by the IBM Institute for Business Value found that 43% of chief operations officers identify data quality issues as their most significant data priority. Furthermore, more than a quarter of organisations estimate that they lose over USD 5 million annually due to poor data quality, while 7% report losses exceeding USD 25 million. Clearly, poor data quality has now become a material business risk.

Why Compliance Leaders Are Raising the Alarm

Regulatory expectations are intensifying, tax authorities rely on digital trails, surveillance frameworks demand precision, and real-time reporting is becoming standard practice.

Nasdaq’s Global Compliance Survey 2025 reinforces this shift. According to the survey, 72% of compliance leaders now rank data quality as their highest monitoring priority over the next 12 months. Surveillance effectiveness (62%) and data completeness (61%) follow closely behind. Notably, handling increased data volumes saw the largest spike in concern, rising from 17.3% in 2024 to 24.5% in 2025, rating it as “extremely challenging.”

This highlights the real challenge: maintaining accuracy at scale. As transaction volumes and digital footprints grow, inconsistent master data becomes increasingly complex and costly to manage, while manual reconciliation struggles to keep up with regulatory scrutiny.

Moving from Data Cleansing to Data Governance

Many organisations begin the financial year with data cleansing by removing duplicates, correcting errors, and standardising formats. Unfortunately, cleansing alone is short-lived. Without governance, inconsistencies resurface. This is where Master Data Management (MDM) becomes essential. By creating a central, governed repository for core entities such as customers, vendors, partners, and products, MDM ensures the organisation operates from a single version of truth, which is a unified, validated dataset that supports every function consistently.

Modern master data management solutions are increasingly API-first, enabling real-time verification of critical fields including GST, PAN, MSME status, and bank account details during onboarding and transactions. Rather than identifying issues after compliance gaps appear, organisations address them at the source.

The result is stronger risk mitigation and tax compliance, reduced exposure from outdated or duplicated records, and more reliable risk assessment built on accurate counterparty data.

Building Continuous Data Readiness

MDM best practices for 2026 emphasise three principles: centralisation, automation, and continuity.

  • Centralisation ensures a single authoritative dataset.
  • Automation enables scalable validation as data volumes grow.
  • Continuity embeds monitoring and periodic updates into everyday workflows.

Rubix MDM combines large-scale data cleansing with API-enabled real-time verification, turning master data into an active control layer rather than a passive repository. This becomes decisive during enterprise transformations, where unmanaged data risk can undermine even the most sophisticated technology investments.

When a major Engineering, Procurement, and Construction (EPC) company decided to migrate from Oracle to SAP S/4HANA, the board recognised that the success of the multi-million-dollar transition rested entirely on data integrity. Rubix was brought in to manage the “Clean-Up.” With its MDM solution, Rubix validated tens of thousands of records, resolving complex duplicates and correcting invalid bank and GST entries. By cleansing the data before the migration, the MDM team ensured that the new SAP environment was audit-ready from its first hour of operation, preventing costly post-migration “stabilisation” phases. Not only did the migration succeed technically, but it also launched on a foundation of trusted, compliant master data.

Starting the Year with Structural Strength

The new financial year is an opportunity to reset. The real clean-up act requires more than deleting old records and involves building a framework where data remains accurate, compliant, and audit-ready throughout the year. This is now an imperative in modern business because resilience begins with reliability, and reliability begins with trusted master data.