How DataOps enabled Standard Bank to gain data quality and agility
Our data journey with IBM started when needing to respond to regulatory changes. We have since evolved to applying the technology to various business cases; most recently adapting to COVID-19 market conditions and now looking to the future for building new use cases with DataOps and AI. The journey begins with seeking to improve our data management, in the areas of data quality, governance, business reporting and customer experience.
The first market force challenges were regulatory -the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS) 239, as well as the local regulatory standards and guidelines for record keeping to support Anti-Money Laundering. This regulatory requirement evolved as our first use case for end-to-end data management. A regulatory fine escalated this to a burning platform. We were investing tens of millions of dollars on data fixes in disparate places and we needed a disciplined data lifecycle approach that was sustainable. Improved data management required us to modernize our data operations with a data integration platform, governance catalog, and software tools for analyzing, cleansing and integrating data. By implementing a suite of IBM DataOps software with two-week agile implementation sprints, we now have a data catalog with its metadata to meet regulatory and compliance requirements— and embedded data quality and governance.
After meeting regulatory requirements, we then expanded on new use cases to improve our business reporting and customer experience, realizing data agility was as much of an asset as money in the bank. For business reporting, we changed the aggregation of our data sources, transforming from batch delivery styles and using static dashboards to persona-based access for near real-time reporting. Our branches improved their seller’s productivity as business performance monitoring reports provided metrics and insights on their marketing tactics. It also allowed for improvements in data modeling and provided our service teams the agility to make decisions for improving the customer experience.
Our data catalog, combined with our master repository for client data, became our single source of truth with embedded governance, capabilities to share a common business glossary of terms and definitions, and the ability to track data lineage. Software tools provided the capabilities to understand, cleanse and transform our data, while also analyzing the quality, structure, format and related relationships.
