Your firm produces a decade of valuable information. A surprising amount of it belongs, contractually, to someone else.
Client interactions in the CRM. Performance history in the reporting system. Documents in whatever storage you use. Communications across email and messaging.
Each sits inside a vendor relationship with its own terms about ownership, portability, and retention.
Most vendor agreements state that the customer owns their data. That is genuine and it is not the whole question.
Ownership without practical portability is close to worthless. The operative question is what you can actually extract, in what format, and whether it is usable outside the system that created it.
Current holdings export cleanly. Ten years of calculated performance history frequently does not, because it exists as computed output rather than as underlying transactions.
Firms discover this when they try to leave, which is exactly the wrong time.
Owning your data and being able to leave with it are different rights. Vendors grant the first far more often than the second.
A buyer performing diligence wants documented history, client records, and a defensible account of the investment process. A firm that cannot produce those is worth less.
This is a valuation issue that presents as an IT issue, which is why it goes unaddressed.
Run an export from each significant system this quarter. Not a test of the feature — an actual export, opened and inspected.
You will find out which systems can genuinely release your data while you still have leverage with them.
Whatever holds performance history. It is the hardest to reconstruct and the most valuable to a buyer.