Financial Services Data Consulting Firms, Ranked by Public Evidence

For the engineering and platform side, see data engineering consulting, data governance consulting firms and platform modernization consulting.

DORA defines ICT services as "digital and data services provided through ICT systems" on an ongoing basis (Article 3(21)). Managed data platforms and ongoing support can fall inside that definition, so agree with your compliance team early whether an engagement counts, and give bidders the contract terms up front.

1. Lineage. Show us how a number in a regulatory or board report traces back to source systems in a platform you built. How do you capture lineage and data quality checks?
2. Reconciliation. How do you prove a migrated warehouse produces the same figures as the old one, and for how long do you run both in parallel?
3. Models. What documentation do you deliver for a credit, fraud or AML model so our validation team can assess conceptual soundness, development data and performance? Who owns the code and the training data afterwards?
4. Contract terms. Will you accept our standard ICT third-party clauses, including audit rights, data location, exit assistance and incident support? Which subcontractors will you use?
5. Data access. Who will see customer or card data, from which countries, and through which controls? Can the work be done on tokenized or masked data?
6. Evidence. Which financial services case studies on your website did this team deliver, for what kind of institution, and can we speak to that client?

Our RFP template lets you send the same questions and scope to every shortlisted firm.

1. Discovery. Map sources, critical data elements, owners and report consumers; agree the contract terms that DORA or your vendor-risk policy require.
2. Build. Ingestion, data quality rules, lineage capture and access controls, with reconciliation checks written alongside the pipelines rather than after them.
3. Parallel run. Produce old and new figures side by side until differences are explained and signed off.
4. Validation and sign-off. Model validation for any credit, fraud or AML model; internal audit or risk review for regulatory reporting.
5. Run. Monitoring, incident handling and the exit plan your contract requires.

The Basel Committee's 2023 review of BCBS 239 adoption is a useful warning about underestimating this work: of 31 global systemically important banks assessed, only two were fully compliant with all the principles, and supervisors found adoption programs often underfunded, limited in scope and short of board attention, with several banks failing to assess the complexity of legacy IT (BIS, 2023). For budgets, see the pricing page.