By Justin Borgman, CEO, Starburst
Global banks and financial services companies hold massive volumes of data split regionally across on-premises and cloud environments. But locating, accessing – and even transferring – data across different cloud environments and geographies to power new banking applications and AI services, let alone existing products, can be a challenge.
The difficulty lies in sifting through a multitude of servers, storage, legacy systems, databases and warehouses all dispersed across different locations and environments, without compromising data sovereignty or regulatory compliance.
We are living in a digital-first economy where retail and corporate banking customers expect immediate access to their accounts, financial data, forecasts and variable interest rates. While unrestricted data access is integral to delivering digital banking services to end-customers, it can also deliver insights and improve decision-making, driving innovation and contributing to the broader corporate strategy. Data modernisation strategies are helping providers to build data infrastructures that span silos, regions and business units, allowing them to query data no matter where it resides, physically or virtually. Not only that, but they can also identify and analyse the data source, to find out if it’s subject to local or global regulations, or data privacy laws, and evaluate how it can be used more effectively. The ability to operate with this level of granularity is leading to better data integration, while helping to transform data management and analytics across the entire organisation.
Universal data access
It might seem trivial, but the virtue of enhancing data accessibility across large global organisations is a major feat that delivers enormous benefits. It helps to break down data silos and integrate data across multiple sources, improving data access for analytics teams, developers and software engineering teams. This significantly improves data analytics and query performance to enable more streamlined and impactful data-driven insights.
In practice this means having a cloud-based managed framework in place that can be deployed immediately, giving users access to all of their data, wherever it resides, and query it directly. These frameworks feature user-friendly interfaces that empower business stakeholders to interact with data, allowing them to generate their own insights. This reduces the workload of the data and analytics teams, freeing them up to prioritise more strategic data projects.
Ultimately, these frameworks allow financial services providers to establish a robust data foundation that will help them to adapt to evolving technology landscapes. This will help to future-proof the business, manage change and reduce the risk against potential disruptions as they migrate data and operations to the cloud.
Speed is the key
For years financial services providers have been hampered by legacy architectures that are unable to operate seamlessly across on-prem and cloud infrastructures. This has led to data fragmentation, sluggish processes and query performance. We know this directly from working with providers that were reliant on platforms that took hours to perform data analytics queries. This led to high volumes of inconsistencies and delayed insights, wasting valuable time and resources.
By adopting a managed framework approach that spans their entire data infrastructure, providers can accelerate data processing, drastically reducing the time needed to generate data insights from several hours to just a few minutes. This improvement enables organisations to respond more quickly to business needs, adapt to market changes, and make data-driven decisions faster.
Achieving data governance and compliance
In addition to optimising data processing, the adoption of managed frameworks also ensures that providers meet data sovereignty requirements. These frameworks can be deployed at any location across an organisation’s infrastructure to ensure greater integration and consistency between the regional clusters and central data hubs. Once implemented, this allows providers to effectively manage the data distribution flow across geographical borders. This enables providers to align with the latest data sovereignty requirements and ensure compliance with data localisation laws across different countries. This will strengthen an organisation’s data governance practices, helping them to build trust with customers, staff, and partners.
Data-driven innovation
But don’t just take our word for it. HSBC adopted a similar framework to gain immediate access to globally dispersed data, while respecting local data sovereignty regulations. HSBC was able to execute queries up to 20X faster, drastically reducing data transfers and duplication, resulting in significant operational and efficiency gains and cost reductions.
HSBC and other financial services providers that have adopted managed frameworks to help modernise their data infrastructure are now able to access data to inform growth strategies and strengthen their competitiveness in global markets.
By unifying their global data, financial services providers will be able to generate real-time views of customers, run faster analytics, and maximise their bottom line while effectively managing risks. It will enable them to drive efficiencies and empower business users with timely, actionable insights, all while future-proofing their data infrastructure to drive innovation.
