Lakehouse for Financial Services delivers partner solutions, use-case accelerators, and data monetisation capabilities designed to address the unique requirements for Financial Service Institutions

Company also taps former Salesforce executive Michael Hartman as new SVP of Regulated Industries to drive customer adoption across the highly regulated areas of banking, insurance and payments 

Databricks, the Data and AI company and pioneer of the data lakehouse architecture, today announced the Databricks Lakehouse for Financial Services, an open, modern data platform tailored to customer use cases across the Banking, Insurance and Capital Markets sectors. As the financial sector moves to embrace open source and cloud technology to drive innovation, Databricks customers and industry partners like Avanade, Deloitte, FINOS, Gemini, Nasdaq and TD Bank are accelerating the time-to-value of their data assets with the Lakehouse for Financial Services. 

Databricks’ Lakehouse for Financial Services is designed to offer customers solutions to address their unique technical and business requirements. With support for real-time analytics, business intelligence (BI), and powerful AI capabilities on all data types, Databricks empowers customers by providing a multi-cloud environment to mitigate the regulatory risk associated with vendor lock-in. The Lakehouse for Financial Services incorporates data solutions and use-case accelerators for critical industry use cases like compliance and regulatory reporting, risk management, fraud and open banking.

TD Bank recently announced the acceleration of its data platform modernization initiative that is leveraging Databricks on Microsoft Azure to enhance analytical capabilities and help power new customer experiences. TD Bank’s SVP Corporate Platforms, Jeff Martin, shared: “At TD, our data and analytics capabilities are central to innovating for our customers in new and meaningful ways. By consolidating our data onto the Microsoft Azure cloud platform and leveraging Databricks, we are further enhancing and evolving the customer experience and supporting new product development.”

“For Financial Service Institutions around the world looking to modernise and innovate, the two most important assets are no longer its capital or sheer scale, but its data and its people,” said Junta Nakai, RVP, Financial Services Global Industry Leader at Databricks. “The Databricks Lakehouse for Financial Services brings these two critical resources together on a secure, collaborative and open source-based data platform that allows FSIs to leverage data across clouds and drive innovation with AI.”

Additionally, Databricks’ Delta Sharing empowers standardised, real-time data sharing with leading financial data providers like Nasdaq, Factset and Intercontinental Exchange, making it easier to consume, share and monetise data through 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 financial sector project of The Linux Foundation, to create an open ecosystem based on common standards for financial data throughout the entire banking ecosystem. 

Industry leading consulting partners like Avanade and Deloitte are partnering with Databricks to further accelerate the adoption of the lakehouse platform in financial services by developing new data services and solutions powered by Databricks. Tailor-made for financial services use-cases, featured partner solutions include:

• ​​Avanade Risk Management: Enables financial institutions to rapidly deploy data into value-at-risk models to keep up with emerging risks and threats. By migrating to the cloud and modernising data-driven risk models, financial institutions are able to reduce regulatory, operational compliance risks related and scale to meet increased throughput – all while adopting a unified approach to data analytics. 
• Deloitte FinServ Governed Data Platform: A cloud-based, curated data platform meeting regulatory requirements that builds a single source of truth for financial institutions to intelligently organise data domains and approved provisioning points, enabling activation of business intelligence, visualisation, predictive analytics, AI/ML, NLP and RPA.

Ecosystem of Data Solutions Customized for Financial Services 

Customers also benefit from vetted data model frameworks, partner solutions and use-case accelerators that are designed to jumpstart the analytics process and solve specific industry challenges including: 

• Post-Trade Analysis and Market Surveillance: Highly scalable time-series processing engine for market data. This library joins core market data and disparate alternative data sources, enabling asset managers to backtest investing strategies at scale and efficiently report on transaction cost analysis.
• Transaction Enrichment: Massively scalable geospatial analytics library built for credit card transaction and open banking analytics. This library enables hyper personalisation in retail banking to better understand customer transaction behaviour required for next generation customer segmentation and modern fraud prevention strategies. 
• Fraud Detection and Prevention with Predictive Analytics: Leverage data and machine learning to help preempt fraud and enhance KYC/AML practices to respond to malicious activity swiftly and curb financial fraud at scale - from fraudulent securities trading to money laundering.
• Regulatory Reporting: Simplifying the complexity of regulatory reporting and compliance while 

streamlining the acquisition, processing and transmission of regulatory data following open data standards and open data sharing protocols.

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

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