Why getting data right matters as much to journalists as to you

0:12Welcome to the latest Margin Notes podcast with me, Simony Kiriakou, editor of FT Advisor. All year we have been taking the topic of risk as our theme for Margin Notes, risk and all its glorious manifestations. But today is a little different. We are joined in the studio by Nessu Nguena, who is doing work experience with the FT Group. She is studying data journalism and has been learning about the benefits of presenting data in a compelling and visually appealing way. She's also been learning about the risks of not getting data right, whether that's the way data is compiled, curated or controlled.

0:45So in this mini pod, we'll be talking to Inesu about her journey into journalism and discussing some of the risks and opportunities that journalists and financial services professionals alike will encounter when it comes to data. Inesu, thank you for joining us. Thank you for having me. That's wonderful. Let's get to know you better. First of all, what made you want to be a journalist? Well, originally I wanted to be a journalist because I thought it was a great opportunity to represent marginalized groups, especially because in the news they get such a negative run and they're not really represented the way they should be.

1:23And I thought it would be a chance to maybe uplift their voices and tell their stories as well. Yeah, absolutely. And then once you started studying at Goldsmiths, right? Yeah. Yeah, you suddenly got interested in data journalism as well as a part of that. What sort of piqued your interest in wanting to develop that as a specialism? I think with data journalism, it brings accuracy to the story and it can help marginalized groups as well.

1:48Anesu Ngwenya: Say with the statistics of black women in childbirth, black women don't make up a large percent of the country, but how dangerous childbirth is for them and their children, that number is really detrimental. And I think it really shows how marginalized groups are still going through issues as well. And studying the statistics around things like that can then help doctors and medical professionals better understand what exactly is driving that proportionately high number of black women suffering problems and complications in childbirth and actually be able to address it with really positive solutions and hopefully change those statistics around, right?

2:32Yeah. I think you're right. That's a beautiful joy of data journalism because it presents a fact or a series of facts in a certain way that over time you can see trends, you can analyze them, and then you can perhaps even start changing the dial, shifting the dial on that. Because unless people see statistics, it's just anecdotes right or it's just stories and it's easy to say it's a one-off here or one-off there but I think that's a that's a really fascinating um fascinating course and have you done a lot of it so far at Goldsmiths did they do like a big course on it oh yes we studied it for about uh like all three years so in first year was mainly just learning how to make your own graphs and uh paired with coding as well and then in second year it was about like finding your own data and then also using knowledge from third year and then we also got to make our own sort of long reads for our final project and it could be about anything and you have to find the data yourself and you could use any sort of data visualization as well like a timeline or like a map or anything like that so what was your long read project on um i did my long read project on black culture and anime and how the two sort of like intertwine and how they've taken inspiration from each other yeah i did not know that there was a big connection between the black culture and anime but there you go i'll have to read your long read i look forward to that thank you but this is a wonderful thing about data when you when you get it and it's clean and it's tidy and it's organized you can tell great stories from it and i know that the the ft has been doing this for a long while but I think everyone's kind of catching up to this that the need to tell stories in a sort of visually appealing way and obviously now you've been sort of doing work experience and interning with the the FT have you started develop ideas about how data journalism and financial journalism kind of come together it's not quite as exciting as anime but yes I learned that how important it is for financial advisors as well and how it can help them with clients and maybe help the client visualize their finances and also how like what risks they can take and sort of their income over the like the past years or so yeah absolutely that sort of cash flow modeling when advisors can show a client you know the graphs in front of them and it's not even just in the in a book or in a presentation document we used to have those you know back in the day i mean i'm much older than you you'd sit down and you just sort of go through you'd have documents sent to you in the post sometimes hundreds of pages sometimes you might see a graph but when an advisor can sit down with the client online and show on a on a tablet or device how that changes you know if you put a little bit more aside the money can really grow if you don't put enough aside this is how much shortfall you could be expected to have in retirement you know that sort of sliding scale and I know advisors use things like in Teleflow and Dynamic Planner to kind of make that really appealing but yeah that that's that's really that's really good as you say it's presenting it very visually and um what then can you say what what sort of uh what can be improved though when using data in a story you know how does it improve it for everyone i think it makes the numbers easier to understand especially if you're reading something like 21 percent it can that might seem quite small but then if you see it on a graph and like if it it can show how impactful it is and it also can make if you're just reading a bunch of numbers it might just just seem like a bunch of numbers but with like say a bar chart or with a like a flow chart it can really show like like the rises and the the falls and it can demonstrate how like impactful it could be yeah that's right because often we see these numbers written down and it's not easy to sort of visualize it but you're right and then of course that's helpful for accessibility right as well because we kind of forget that the majority of the population in the uk are not financially literate i think the fca a few years ago developed did a study and found that at least i think it was about 11 of the population had just very basic reading and literacy understanding which is a huge number but again we need to think how do we help these people become more financially resilient well if you can send them a hundred paid document with loads of statistics just written down it's not really going to help is it so yeah i think that that's really interesting so of course you've looked at this we've talked now about the importance of data journalism and telling a story in graphic detail um and i mean graphic in the in the drum in the dramatization way not in the um in sort of like some kind of graphic novels that's a that's a podcast for a different time guys that's a different that's a different kind of podcast um but let's look at the risks of getting data wrong because clearly when you've been a journalist you've looked at issues when there are being gaps in data or it's not clean data so can you just talk about what can go wrong with data so data could be mishandled or lost and it can also be unstructured as well and with that that can fines could happen so um with like the most serious fine is like a gdpr infringement of 17.5 million pounds yeah or i think is it four percent of a firm's turnover yeah i mean that's really bad like that's that's just talking about mishandling of of client data right if you don't get it right and someone finds out there's been a gdpr breach this is really really serious so that's like the security issue but what about a firm who just has like really bad data or inherits bad data how expensive is it to deal with incorrect or incomplete data?

8:29So there is an example of that with the software bureau and it estimates that organizations spend around 20 percent of their revenue dealing with inaccurate data or duplicates and deceased records and in the UK economy that could cost up to 900 billion pounds. 900 billion pounds I mean this is huge economically but also 20 percent of a company's turnover is an enormous statistic it's very worrying that a company could actually have to spend that much in human resource time cost just putting things right instead of actually building for the you know structuring for the next you know five ten years of of company growth you know i mean i'm sure there are ai tools there are ai tools out there that can sort of help to do this and i know there's lots of accounting software and auditing software you can use but you really need people who understand the data and to be able to if ai spots the gaps a human being has to be able to resolve them don't they because it clearly it's expensive to deal with incorrect or incomplete data but and you know you've talked about not keeping data safe and how much people could be fined but what what kind of uh tools are there that we can use perhaps to kind of clean up data or keep data?

9:46So there's cash flow tools. And an example of that is CashCalc. Right. Yeah, so it allows financial advisors to build visual lifetime forecasts for clients. And it maps out their incomes, expenses, investments, and tax scenarios. and it was originally designed by a financial advisor so it does make it more practical as well all right yeah that's a good one isn't it because that then looks at the data once you've got your client data nice you can then do the presenting on it and you know you've got it cleaned up but we've had financial advisors talk to us before they've gone to buy another firm and they call it a data room the data room is uh is a mess incomplete files you know 10 of it could still be on um on paper i know another financial advisor firm that looked at another client another potential client bank to buy and a huge proportion of these were on something called a fiche reader have you ever heard of a fiche reader i've i've actually worked on fiche readers but they they were sort of developed in the 70s and 80s called microfiche and little films that you sort of almost like negatives for a photo.

11:04Do you know what a photo negative is? Yeah. Okay, good, good, good. And it's sort of kept in these files and a lot of the files are there and like no one uses fiche readers anymore. Like what the Dickens is it? So, you know, you just turn away and that's going to cut a deal. You're just going to say, no, I don't want your client bank. It's going to cost me too much to deal with this mess of a data. And then if you do want to make your, Or, you know, if you don't use things like cash calc or the dynamic planner tools, you want to use any of these tools as an advisor. You've got to have your own data clean and tidy because how can you even start presenting really good things to your clients or using it properly yourself?

11:41If it's not clean, if it's not tidy, if it's not neat, you know, if it's not organized and structured and safe and secure. Yeah. So that's really important. important and then just coming back to um coming back then to to clients like say that the advisor has got beautiful foundation stones set in place of this wonderful data it's all clean it's all tidy there are no gaps it's all secure um they're starting to use cash flow planning tools um what can this then do for a client i mean how would you as a client feel when you start seeing these things i think it would help me understand my final my financial spending and i think it also helps that it builds trust between the two and it makes it more it makes it easier to understand so like before i think before having that data shown it's more like you're speaking two different languages but when it's in a graph or in a bar chart is you can you have understanding between you as a client and then the financial advisor as well and what's it the picture speaks a thousand words yeah um do you use any um money management apps on your phone or any banking apps that have pictorial representations that show you how your money is performing um i have um revolute and then i also have my own like isa account and it does have um a graph and so it does show like it's a stocks and share isa so it does show oh you'll make the advisors happy to hear that yeah so it does show like the um when it first opened to how much money's in it now yeah yeah that's really important and i actually have a i've got a seven year old son seven and a half sorry he would correct me if you heard this and i show him his junior isa and there's not much in it because i'm a journalist after all um but he sees the graphs and so he can tell like when it goes up or down and he can tell if it's acting in a really volatile manner and I can talk through very basic concepts with him about the importance of long-term planning and show him over time and I think just being able to use that like show him over six months one year three years five years well you know just how things are panning out it makes it real to him I haven't gone into the intricacies of asset allocation and portfolio management and whether he's chasing alpha or whether he's investing in all these highfalutin things, but I've been able to just show him the basics.

14:11And even that basic financial literacy at young age is really important. So I don't know how much financial education you had at school. I know it's coming in in 2028, but did you have any idea about financial education or investing or stocks and shares ISAs when you were at school? No, I had no idea. And with my stocks and shares ISA, it was from when they did the child trust fund. So my mum, she took the money and put it into an ISA. And then just before I turned 18, a financial advisor came over and she just explained everything. And even when she was explaining, I didn't have... I knew what she was talking about and I knew that it was to go towards a mortgage or retirement.

14:58But I still didn't have a full understanding of it. and then when I did see the money and I did see the graph, it kind of helped me understand it a bit better. And you had a financial advisor. How old are you? I'm 22 now. 22 and she's sitting down with a financial advisor to talk about making a start in life. That is fantastic. Well done, your mum. And also well done, financial advisors. So there you go. It's never too young to start talking to clients and potential new clients about their ISAs. You get them set up on a firm foundation. And what would you like to see then personally? As a customer of financial services, what would you like to see?

15:39How would you like to see data being employed more? I think data should be easy to read and it should be interactive because I think even though a graph is more interesting than reading the statistics or the numbers, I think it is important for it to just be fun and to show that it's not that boring and it is like very important to your everyday life as well. Right so we could put a few more on our FT Advisor Instagram accounts maybe make them a bit more fun but thank you very much for joining us. Thank you for having me. And thank you for listening. For more news and views keep posted on ftadvisor.com and until next time take care.

16:42We'll see you next time.

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