Don't panic—this is not another blog about GenAI. This one’s about client data disasters!

If you think your data is bad, trust me—you’re not alone.

Over the course of a 20-year career working with financial data, you get to see a lot. From pristine, best-practice, cleaned, tagged, and structured data whizzing via APIs across the globe... …to a hard drive storing data worth £250,000 being used as a coffee cup holder!

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As part of understanding a client’s data engineering and AI needs, I ask a lot of questions. They’re pretty straightforward—designed to narrow in on where tech can help.

They’re also designed to rule out where tech is* not needed. More than half the time, common sense beats software.

Typical questions include:

• "Have you backed up your data recently?"

• "Do you have failover if your servers go down?"

• "Is there more than one person in your firm with access to the AWS keys?"

Our job is to shine a light on bottlenecks and weak links—then suggest the* right *tech (or sometimes, just the right habit change).

Below are some real anonymised client exchanges I’ve had over the years…

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☔️ Client A: Flooding

Insig: "What would you say the biggest risk to your data is?"

Client A: "Flooding."

Insig: "Flooding?"

Client A: "Yeah. We store all our data in hard drives in that server room… which is unfortunately also where we keep the boiler. It’s leaking."

Insig: "How bad would it be if it actually flooded?"

Client A: "We’d have to close the company."

Solution: Migrated all server data to a cloud-based infrastructure, backed up in two separate locations. The server room is now used to store staff bicycles.

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🧮 Client B: Fat Finger

Client B: "We’ve lost £150,000,000."

Insig: "Did the markets take a turn? Were you not hedged?"

Client B: "No—the PnL Excel file is missing £150m. I don’t know where it’s gone. This could trigger redemptions."

Insig: "Has anything changed in the file recently?"

Client B: "Yes, I cleaned up some old formulas that were slowing it down."

Insig: "Have you tried CTRL + Z?"

Client B: "You are a genius! The £150m is back."

Solution: *Shifted all source data into a database, replicated the PnL logic in Python. Also helped the client book a long-overdue holiday.

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💾 Client C: “Our data is gone… all of it.”

Client C: "Do you by any chance have a backup of our data?"

Insig: "Which data?"

Client C: "All of it."

Insig: "What happened?"

Client C: "We switched providers. The job failed. Everything’s gone."

Insig: "What does that mean for your fund?"

Client C: "We have to shut down—immediately."

Insig: "We took a snapshot of your data during our last integrity check. It’s 48 hours old. Will that do?"

Client C: "I could marry you right now."

Solution: *Migrated everything to a secure, cloud-based setup with redundant backups. Crisis averted.

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📊 Client D: Running Out of Rows*

Insig: "What’s your biggest concern in your role?"

Client D: "That my spreadsheet is running out of rows to store our track record."

Insig: "Excel supports up to a million rows. How many have you used?"

Client D: "997,132."

Solution: Migrated all Excel history into a database. Centralised the data feeds. Automated the calculations using Python.

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☁️ Client E: “We already use the cloud.”

Insig: "Have you considered moving to the cloud?"

Client E: "We already use the cloud extensively."

Insig: "Great—AWS, Azure, AliCloud?"

Client E: "No, Google."

Insig: "Ah—Google Cloud Platform?"

Client E: *"Um… no. Google Drive. We store all our data there."

Solution: Migrated all files into a secure cloud based infrastructure.

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📋 Client F: CTRL C + CTRL V

Insig: "Where does your team spend the most time in the trade process? Research? Backtesting?"

Client F: "Copying and pasting trade details."

Insig: "Copy/paste? Doesn’t your PMS handle that?"

Client F: "It handles 80% of securities. But not real estate, aircraft, or private CLOs. We export that data, then copy/paste into the aggregate Excel file."

Insig: "How long does that take?"

Client F: "About one week a month."

Insig: "For all four of your analysts?"

Client F: "Yes."

Insig: "So you lose one person-year to copy/paste."

Client F: "I never thought of it like that—but yes."

Solution: *Automated aggregation via central database + Python logic. Team now spends time thinking, not copying.

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🧹 Final Thoughts

These are just a few of the data disasters I’ve helped untangle. Sometimes it takes tech, often, it just takes a bit of common sense and a CTRL + Z.