Major projects across the UK’s financial services sector are running five months late on average due to growing decision complexity.

New research from Ordnance Survey (OS), which polled over 80 senior financial service leaders across the UK, has revealed that there is a growing “confidence deficit” at the heart of UK decision making.

It said in a sector where strategic decisions direct multimillion-pound investments, from critical infrastructure expansion and outage response to insurance and climate mitigation, a quarter of financial services leaders (25%) said they regularly have to revisit major strategic decisions because of incomplete or inaccurate data, leading to delays of five months on average.

Four in five financial services firms (79%) said decision-making has changed significantly over the past five years. Four in ten (40%) say decisions are more complex than ever, a further 38% said they take longer to make, and 37% say they are also having to make significantly more strategic decisions than before.

Compounding this, the pressure to act at pace is intensifying, with a quarter of financial services leaders (25%) feel expected to move faster than ever.

When looking at why delays are arising, 28% say the sheer volume of data now available has left them with a less joined-up view than they had five years ago, and a further 28% report greater “decision fatigue” as a result.

In all 31% said concerns about data quality are actively undermining confidence in major business decisions, and 32% say understanding where their data comes from has become a business-critical issue in its own right.

The research also revealed that these problems are being amplified as organisations integrate AI into their decision-making. 72% of financial service leaders are not confident in the data used to generate AI insights, while more than a quarter (26%) are not confident in the data used to train the models behind them – creating the conditions for errors to be learnt and repeated while costs and delays accumulate.

Reflecting on solutions to the problem, nearly half (47%) said better access to high-quality, trusted data would directly enable faster decision-making, while over four in ten (42%) said trusted location data specifically helps them make more confident decisions and reduce costly project delays.

OS said this may explain why accuracy of data and analysis ranked as the top priority for almost half of firms (46%) – nearly twice as important as cost (26%). Reliability and trustworthiness of underlying data came second (40%), followed by speed of insights that accelerate strategic decision-making (37%).

Tina Kennedy, chief customer officer at Ordnance Survey, said: “Financial services businesses today are making the most consequential decisions of a generation, and they’re making them faster than ever before – from planning resilient infrastructure and assessing climate risk to making major investment and underwriting decisions. But moving quickly is not the same as getting it right. When the data driving those decisions is incomplete or inconsistent, organisations pay the price twice – once in the bad decision, and again in the cost of remaking it.”

“As AI increasingly influences strategic decision-making, the quality and provenance of the underlying data that powers it becomes even more critical,” Kennedy continued. “That is why organisations working in these critical financial service industries, and in an increasingly complex world, need to look at location first. When leaders have trusted, accurate location data, they have the confidence to move quickly and decisively, connecting the dots between operational, customer and network intelligence in ways that fragmented or incomplete data simply cannot. That is what enables organisations to get decisions right the first time.”