>>yes but thinking about it we shouldn’t have copies of finance data anywhere apart from live or test servers! you may have to develop “blind” and then ask the DBA team to deploy to UAT for you to test?

That's extreme, but people are waking up to the reality that most sensitive data breaches originate with people entrusted with access, not external sneaks. In the US, healthcare Information holders are increasingly paranoid about the possibility of breaches. Just recently, Anthem (huge in US healthcare) had a massive privacy breach involving tens of millions of patients, attributed to a compromised administrator login. Gone or at least going are the days when contractors, administrators or analysts could dip into sensitive data at will...

Can they at least give you a test database, even with some anonymized data? If this is their policy, you won't be the first or last to need such a thing.