Financial Services Firms Have Successfully Modernized IT Despite Heavy Regulation, and You Can, Too

Financial services organizations constantly seek to accelerate their time to insights because it can deliver significant benefits to the organization. Examples abound where data truly changes the business for the better: TD Bank in North America leverages data insights to offer more personalized services to its customers. And Euronext in Europe takes advantage of this acceleration to deliver insight-ready data for traders and investors to make their decisions faster than anyone else.

To get from data to insights faster, most banks, insurance and financial services companies would like to leverage cloud for its ability to scale compute, data storage, and analytics performance on-demand. Unfortunately, because this industry is highly regulated there has been an historical hesitancy and obstacles to move to the cloud. But the benefits of a cloud or hybrid cloud architecture are just too good to pass. A governed cloud data lake, if deployed correctly, can be the solution for a data-driven strategy that meets the specific requirements of financial services companies safely and efficiently. As a result, cloud can be an enabler of their digital transformation by accelerating the time from data to insights.

Regulations and trust

To use data in new and faster ways, financial services organizations face several challenges, not the smallest of all being regulations. As Forrester recently stated, “by 2022, half of our planet’s population will have their personal information protected under local privacy regulations in line with the GDPR.”

The data must be safeguarded to meet regulatory data governance requirements. Depending on the region, the guiding regulations might include General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), recommendations from the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive II (MiFID II), the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), and others.

Ensuring compliance makes it harder for users and applications to access the data easily. And when access is provided, users need to trust their data.

Most organizations struggle when trying to balance the need for access to data and the assurance that the data is accurate, protected, and compliant.

Leveraging the cloud for better data and innovation

Increasingly, organizations are moving to the cloud to address these issues. To do so, many organizations must get over long-standing perceptions about cloud. Frequently, there are concerns about relying on a third party and not having full control over the data and access to the data. But most public cloud providers are actually much safer and more reliable than on-premises instances. According to Gartner, “Through 2020, public cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) workloads will suffer at least 60% fewer security incidents than those in traditional data centers.”

One cloud architecture that addresses the needs to meet regulatory requirements while providing easy access is a governed cloud data lake.

Cloud data lake infrastructures provide users and developers with self-service access to what was traditionally disparate or siloed information. They have become a core component for companies moving to modern data platforms as they scale their data operations. A governed cloud data lake offers:

• Flexibility since an organization can store structured and unstructured data as-is
• Access control and easy access for those who need it
• Trusted data
• Scalability, reliability, availability (harnessing the intrinsic features of cloud technology)

An example of the benefits these features deliver can be found in a deployment by an international wealth management firm. It implemented a cloud data lake solution on Amazon S3 and leveraged the Talend Platform for real-time, big data integration. This lets the firm ingest data from disparate sources and pull it into Amazon S3. IT then uses Talend Data Catalog to find data and see its lineage and a semantic view of the data.

Using this technology, the firm can now gather data in the data lake on AWS and use Talend for data quality assessments and fixes. It can refine its data, process it quickly, and be confident including it in required reports. As a result, the company now has better data available for both business and regulatory reporting.

Summary of benefits

Cloud technologies enable companies at each step of their digital transformation.

A data lake properly deployed in the cloud can meet the conditions of regulatory mandates. At the same time, users can be confident that they will have access to the data when needed, the data will be accurate, and its use will be compliant.

Better data and easier access to the data ultimately benefits customers. It can be used to deliver improved customer service and enhance the user experience.

Cloud data lakes also simplify data analytics. Users have assured access to data, trust in the data, and a faster time to insight. This helps organizations be more competitive and deliver better products and services.

For example, TD Bank built a cloud data lake with data on customer behavior and interests, internal and external data, and structured and unstructured data. By applying complex analytics to that data, TD Bank can create unique, tailor-made experiences for each customer. “Whether our customers are visiting a branch or using a tablet, phone, computer, or wearable device, our big data cloud-based infrastructure enables us to predict their needs and guide them through their financial journey,” said Joseph DosSantos, VP, Enterprise Information Management, TD Bank Group.

Cloud can also open the door to new strategic initiatives and business models and new ways to generate new revenue. That is the case with Euronext, which was able to build a new modern platform. The platform allows the monetization of data through a marketplace, which already accounts for 20 percent of its income.

For more information, visit these sources:

Best practices for building a cloud data lake you can trust – ebook

How AMP ltd. built a cloud data lake for their needs– webinar

About Talend

Talend (Nasdaq: TLND), a leader in cloud integration solutions, puts more of the right data to work for your business, faster. Talend Cloud delivers a single platform for simple and complex data integration tasks across public, private, and hybrid cloud, as well as on-premises environments, and enables greater collaboration between IT and business teams. Combined with self-service solutions and hundreds of pre-built connectors from SaaS applications to cloud data warehouses, Talend allows you to meet the demands of ever-increasing data volumes, users cost-effectively, and use cases.

Almost 3,000 global enterprise customers have chosen Talend to put their data to work including GE, HP Inc., and Domino’s. Talend has been recognized as a leader in its field by leading analyst firms and industry publications including Forbes, InfoWorld, and SD Times. For more information, please visit Talend and follow us on Twitter: @Talend.