Data Lineage

For a fund, lineage traces a figure such as a NAV per share, a position’s price or an investor’s capital balance back through each step: source (broker file, pricing vendor, bank statement), ingestion, transformations and mappings, calculations, and the final report. Good lineage shows which system is the golden source for each data element and who can change it.

Lineage supports audit, regulatory reporting, investor queries and error investigation: when a number is wrong, lineage shows where it went wrong and what else is affected. It is especially important during IBOR and ABOR implementations, administrator transitions and data migrations, when mappings between old and new charts of accounts, security identifiers and investor records must be proved.

Common problems are undocumented spreadsheet steps between systems, manual overrides without audit trail, and multiple unsynchronized copies of reference data. Capturing lineage in the platform, rather than in separate documentation, keeps it accurate as processes change.