Wealth-Tech Test-Data Maturity Assessment
Most wealth-tech teams don't fail audits because they lack tests — they fail because the test corpus is opaque. Engineering can't tell QA what's covered, QA can't tell compliance, compliance can't tell the examiner. This assessment reads where your team is on the curve from ad-hoc fixtures to a defensible, version-pinned synthetic corpus, and tells you the next two or three things to fix.
What you walk away with
~12 min · 5 categories · 22 items- A banded score across five capability areas: corpus quality, edge-case coverage, refresh cadence, governance, and audit-readiness.
- A radar chart showing the shape of your maturity (so a strong corpus with weak governance reads differently from balanced ad-hoc).
- A ranked remediation list — every gap maps to a specific Wealth Data Set, archetype, or checklist that closes it.
- A defensible score citation calibrated against fintech audit findings 2022-2025, suitable for a steering-committee deck.
Answer every item (0 of 22 so far) to lock in a banded score and unlock the remediation roadmap. Live category scores update as you go.
Corpus quality
0 / 5 answeredWhether the synthetic data your team uses is internally consistent, demographically plausible, and longitudinally coherent — or whether it's a pile of randomized fields that looks fine until a code path actually exercises it.
- Arithmetic invariants are enforced
Balances reconcile. Income equals sum of sources. Net worth equals assets minus liabilities. Tax due equals AGI math. Every household passes a strict invariant gate before it lands in a test environment.
- Demographic distributions match real wealth-management book
Age, income, asset, and account distributions reflect a real wealth-management book — not a uniform random sample. Right-tail and left-tail thickness are deliberate, not accidental.
- Longitudinal coherence over 24+ months
Income trajectories, account balances, and life events evolve coherently across time. A retirement event in month 36 changes the cash-flow shape in month 37; a divorce splits the household correctly.
- Each production code path has a representative household
For every meaningful branch in your business logic — ITIN filer, K-1 income, multi-state, AMT trigger, IRMAA bracket — there's a documented synthetic household that exercises it.
- Corpus is version-pinned and reproducible
Every test artifact identifies the exact corpus version it was run against. Re-running the same test against the same version produces the same result, deterministically.
Edge-case coverage
0 / 5 answeredThe cases that move bugs from staging to production. Wash-sale across accounts, RMD aggregation, IRMAA cliff, ITIN filer KYC, NUA election, QSBS holding period — the structurally tricky ones examiners and customers find first.
- Tax edge cases are systematically covered
Wash-sale across taxable accounts, lot-selection (LIFO/FIFO/HIFO/specific-id), short-vs-long term boundaries, AMT triggers, NUA elections, and QSBS holding-period cases each have a fixture.
- Retirement edge cases are systematically covered
RMD aggregation rules across IRAs vs. 401(k)s, Roth conversion mid-year cases, IRMAA cliff transitions, Social Security earnings test triggers, and Medicare enrollment timing cases each have a fixture.
- KYC / onboarding edge cases are covered
ITIN filers, dual-citizenship FBAR triggers, mixed-status households, trustee-on-account scenarios, and PEP-adjacent designations each have representative households.
- Household life events are exercised
Divorce, death, beneficiary change, large-deposit, retirement transition, dependent aging out — each has a synthetic household where the event fires within the longitudinal window.
- Behavioral edge cases are represented
Risk-tolerance change post-market-shock, panic-sell signal, contribution pause, contribution surge, and beneficiary-change-after-life-event cases are present.
Refresh cadence
0 / 4 answeredWhether your corpus stays in sync with the regulatory and product environment. Tax brackets move. Reg BI guidance updates. Your typology catalog evolves. A static corpus rots quietly until an examiner asks a question it can't answer.
- Tax brackets, contribution limits, and SS COLA refresh annually
When the IRS publishes new brackets, the IRA contribution limit moves, or SSA announces COLA, your corpus reflects the change within the same calendar quarter.
- Regulatory updates trigger corpus changes
Reg BI no-action guidance, FINRA notices, SEC sweep findings, and FinCEN typology updates trigger documented corpus changes within a defined SLA.
- New product features drive new archetypes
When product ships a new feature, engineering specifies the archetypes the corpus needs to gain — before the feature reaches QA.
- Distribution drift is detected between releases
When a corpus refresh changes distributions in unexpected ways, automated drift detection flags it before it lands in CI.
Governance
0 / 4 answeredWho owns the corpus, who can change it, and what trail those changes leave. The questions an examiner asks before they look at a single record.
- Corpus has a named owner with a documented mandate
One named individual or team is accountable for the corpus. Their mandate is written down, reviewed quarterly, and signed off by engineering, QA, and compliance.
- Corpus changes go through change control
Every corpus change has a ticket, an owner, a reviewer, and a documented rationale. Ad-hoc edits in dev environments don't drift back into the canonical corpus.
- Corpus license terms are documented and accepted
If the corpus is third-party, the license is on file. If it's anonymized real data, the legal memo is on file. If it's synthetic, the attestation is on file. Procurement and InfoSec can find it without asking.
- PII / NPI attestation is in place
A documented attestation states the corpus contains no real PII / NPI. The attestation is dated, signed, and kept current with each refresh.
Audit-readiness
0 / 4 answeredWhether the corpus survives contact with an examiner. The artifacts auditors actually ask for, in the form they expect.
- An evidence package exists for the most recent release
For each production release, there is a packaged set of: corpus version, archetype list, code-path coverage matrix, invariant-check report, and validator output.
- An auditor walkthrough has been rehearsed in the last 12 months
Compliance has walked an internal or external auditor through the corpus, the controls, and the evidence — and the resulting findings have been remediated.
- Reg BI defensibility is structurally provable from the corpus
For each recommendation type the firm makes, the corpus contains the synthetic households and the audit-trail fields required to demonstrate Care Obligation compliance.
- Production incidents are replayed against the corpus
When a production bug surfaces, an engineer can identify the synthetic household that should have caught it, and then add it to the corpus so the bug can never recur silently.
Banded score reference
Ad Hoc
0–30%The corpus is whatever lives in dev fixtures. Bugs surface coverage gaps; coverage gaps surface in production. Auditors will ask questions the team can't answer structurally.
Next step: Adopt a calibrated archetype set as the canonical test corpus. Stop hand-rolling fixtures.
Defined
30–55%The team has a documented corpus with some structure. Edge-case coverage is partial, governance is owned but lightly exercised, and audit-readiness depends on individual heroics.
Next step: Close the highest-leverage edge-case gaps and wire change control into the existing process.
Managed
55–80%The corpus is governed, refreshed, and structurally complete for the firm's main code paths. Most audit questions can be answered from the corpus alone.
Next step: Tighten drift detection and rehearse the auditor walkthrough — the next-band gap is mostly about evidence packaging.
Optimized
80–100%The corpus is a defensible asset. Every code path has coverage, every release ships an evidence package, every regulatory change drives a documented refresh.
Next step: Operate the steady-state. Use the assessment quarterly to detect drift and prevent regressions.
Key takeaways
- A defensible corpus is documented, version-pinned, and reproducible — not just realistic-looking.
- Edge-case coverage is the single highest-leverage area: most production defects in wealth-tech come from cases that were not represented in the test corpus.
- Refresh cadence matters as much as initial fidelity. A pristine corpus from 2023 is liability in 2026.
- Governance is what turns a good corpus into a defensible one. Owner, change control, license, attestation — all four are needed.
- Audit-readiness is mostly about packaging. The artifacts an examiner asks for are predictable; teams that fail audits usually had the data and just couldn't produce it on demand.
FAQ
Why a four-point scale instead of yes/no?
Yes/no is too coarse — most teams sit somewhere between 'we don't do this' and 'we do this and measure it.' The four-point scale (Absent / Ad Hoc / Defined / Optimized) maps to CMMI levels familiar to audit committees and produces a result with shape rather than a binary pass/fail.
How is the score calibrated?
Bands are anchored against published regulatory findings — primarily the SEC robo-advisor sweep (2021), FINRA Reg BI sweep findings (2023), and FTC Safeguards Rule consent orders (2023-2024). Optimized means the firm would survive a structural examination of its synthetic-data practice without findings.
Can I take this assessment for a specific product line?
Yes. The assessment is product-agnostic — score it once for the firm overall, then re-score it scoped to a specific product (TLH engine, robo-advisor, RMD service). The radar shape will differ; that's the point.
What does the remediation roadmap actually do?
Every low-scored item links to a specific WealthSynth artifact — a Wealth Data Set, an archetype, a checklist — that closes the gap. The roadmap ranks them by score gap, so the highest-leverage remediations come first.