Databricks Announces Lakehouse For Financial Services To Accelerate Data-Driven Innovation

Lakehouse for Financial Services provides partner solutions, use-case accelerators, and data monetization capabilities tailored to Financial Service Institutions’ specific needs.

Former Salesforce executive Michael Hartman has been appointed as the company’s new SVP of Regulated Industries, tasked with driving client adoption across the highly regulated industries of banking, insurance, and payments.

Databricks, a data and AI company that pioneered the data lakehouse architecture, recently announced the Databricks Lakehouse for Financial Services, an open, modern data platform tailored to customer use cases in the Banking, Insurance, and Capital Markets sectors. As the financial sector embraces open source and cloud technology to drive innovation, Databricks customers and industry partners such as Avanade, Deloitte, FINOS, Gemini, Nasdaq, and TD Bank are using the Lakehouse for Financial Services to accelerate the time-to-value of their data assets.

Introduction

Databricks is a data and artificial intelligence company. More than 5,000 organizations worldwide rely on the Databricks Lakehouse Platform to unify their data, analytics, and AI, including Comcast, Condé Nast, H&M, and more than 40% of the Fortune 500. Databricks is headquartered in San Francisco and has offices all over the world. Databricks was founded by the original creators of Apache SparkTM, Delta Lake, and MLflow to assist data teams in solving the world’s most difficult problems.

What is Databricks Lakehouse For Financial Services?

The Lakehouse for Financial Services from Databricks is designed to provide customers with solutions that fit their specific technical and business needs. Databricks empowers businesses by providing a multi-cloud environment to avoid the regulatory risk associated with vendor lock-in by supporting real-time analytics, business intelligence (BI), and advanced AI capabilities on all data types. For essential industry use cases including compliance and regulatory reporting, risk management, fraud, and open banking, the Lakehouse for Financial Services includes data solutions and use-case accelerators.

“The two most important assets for Financial Service Institutions around the world looking to modernize and innovate are not capital or sheer scale, but data and people,” said Junta Nakai, RVP, Financial Services Global Industry Leader at Databricks. “The Databricks Lakehouse for Financial Services brings together these two critical resources on a secure, collaborative, and open source-based data platform that enables FSIs to leverage data across clouds and drive innovation with AI.”

Furthermore, Databricks’ Delta Sharing enables standardized, real-time data sharing with leading financial data providers such as Nasdaq, Factset, and Intercontinental Exchange, making it simpler to consume, share, and monetize data via the lakehouse platform. True to Databricks’ open source roots, the Lakehouse for Financial Services is also integrated with Legend, a cornerstone project of FINOS, the Fintech Open Source Foundation, and a financial sector project of The Linux Foundation, to create an open ecosystem based on common financial data standards across the entire banking ecosystem.

Leading consulting firms such as Avanade and Deloitte are collaborating with Databricks to accelerate the adoption of the lakehouse platform in financial services by developing new data services and solutions powered by Databricks. Featured partner solutions for financial services use-cases include:

• Avanade Risk Management: Allows financial institutions to rapidly deploy data into value-at-risk models to stay ahead of emerging risks and threats. Financial institutions can reduce regulatory and operational compliance risks and scale to meet increased throughput by migrating to the cloud and modernizing data-driven risk models – all while adopting a unified approach to data analytics.
• Deloitte FinServ Governed Data Platform: A cloud-based, curated data platform that enables financial institutions to intelligently organize data domains and approved provisioning points, enabling the activation of business intelligence, visualization, predictive analytics, AI/ML, NLP, and RPA.

Customized Data Solutions Ecosystem for Financial Services

Customers also benefit from vetted data model frameworks, partner solutions, and use-case accelerators designed to kickstart the analytics process and address specific industry challenges, such as:

• Post-Trade Analysis and Market Surveillance: A time-series processing engine for market data that is highly scalable. This library connects core market data and disparate alternative data sources, allowing asset managers to backtest investing strategies at scale and report on transaction cost analysis in real-time.
• Transaction Enrichment is a massively scalable geospatial analytics library developed for credit card transactions and open banking analytics. This library enables hyper-personalization in retail banking to better understand customer transaction behavior, which is required for next-generation customer segmentation and modern fraud prevention strategies.
• Predictive Analytics for Fraud Detection and Prevention: Utilize data and machine learning to help prevent fraud and improve KYC/AML practices to respond quickly to malicious activity and reduce financial fraud on a large scale – from fraudulent securities trading to money laundering.
• Regulatory Reporting: Simplifying regulatory reporting and compliance by streamlining the acquisition, processing, and transmission of regulatory data per open data standards and open data sharing protocols.

Roundup

With the appointment of Michael Hartman as SVP of Regulated Industries, Databricks has added an executive to lead its global expansion and growth in Financial Services, as well as other regulated sectors such as Public Sector and Healthcare. He joins from Salesforce, where he was most recently the EVP of North American Financial Services, and where he spent the previous decade helping to build out their Financial Services strategy and teams.

Databricks Ventures earlier this year announced an investment in TickSmith, a B2B SaaS platform and early Delta Sharing partner that provides data monetization solutions built on top of the Lakehouse for Financial Services, demonstrating the company’s commitment to the high-growth vertical.