IntroductionFor reporting and for analytics purposes, financial banks highly demand real-time delivery of quality operational information. This means working with high volumes of data regularly, that would need to be managed to produce the best quality of data for analytics and reporting purposes. Through the empirical study, it was found that banks are still faced with challenges of data management, maintaining and creating quality data. Business Intelligence (BI) entails timely analysis and decision AbstractFor reporting and for analytics purposes, financial banks highly demand real-time delivery of quality operational information. This paper argues that for banks to improve their decision making and performance management, business intelligence and data management ought to be core activities. Conversely, Business Intelligence (BI) and Master Data Management (MDM) are activities with most challenges as financial banks grapple with ways to make profitable informed decisions that align with the projected business targets and goals. In this paper, the argument is that a profound understanding of master data management, as an activity, is important to the delivery of real-time quality information. Subsequently, business intelligence should improve. To this point, this paper explores and describes how an understanding of MDM activities may lead to improved business intelligence in a financial bank. In this paper, MDM and BI are seen as activity systems. However, this paper focuses on the MDM activity and not the BI activity. Activity theory is used as a lens to analyze the activity system. The paper concludes by conceptualizing a framework for improving business intelligence through a sound master data management.