With rising data volumes, regulatory scrutiny and business expectations, the finance industry is under increasing pressure to modernize enterprise data platforms. These demands are leading banking and financial institutions to shift to a cloud‑native, scalable and governed data platform, which can serve both analytical and operational use cases.
One such leading banking organization embarked on a strategic transformation journey to strengthen its risk reporting capabilities and establish a single, trusted view of customer data. The transformation journey focused on two critical pillars: modernizing the Risk Data Mart and establishing a trusted, enterprise‑wide Customer Golden Record (eCIF).
However, legacy systems, fragmented data sources and manual processes were limiting agility and slowing decision‑making. To address these challenges and build a future‑ready data foundation, the client partnered with Persistent and Databricks to drive a unified enterprise data modernization initiative on Azure.
Challenges in the Existing Data Landscape
The client’s data environment had evolved over time, resulting in multiple structural and operational challenges that affected both business users and technology teams.
- Dependence on on‑premise enterprise data warehouse was creating scalability limitations and slowing down analytics initiatives.
- High levels of manual intervention across data ingestion, validation, and reporting workflows, increased the risk of errors.
- Fragmented customer data was spread across heterogeneous source systems, with no single, authoritative customer view.
- Inconsistent and conflicting customer attributes existed across systems, with no mechanism to determine the most reliable data.
- Limited visibility into data lineage and quality impacted regulatory confidence and auditability.
- Growing pressure to improve turnaround times for risk and finance reporting while supporting near real‑time downstream consumption was a continuous challenge.
Together, these challenges made it difficult for the banking institution to respond quickly to regulatory observations, enable advanced analytics and deliver consistent insights to business users. As reporting demands increased and near real‑time data consumption became a priority, the organization recognized the need for a comprehensive, cloud‑based transformation rather than incremental fixes.
A Unified Data Modernization Strategy with Persistent & Databricks
Persistent partnered with the client to design and implement a modern enterprise data platform built on Azure, leveraging Databricks as the core processing and analytics layer. The engagement focused on two tightly integrated initiatives: modernizing the Risk Data Mart and creating an enterprise‑wide eCIF. Rather than treating these as isolated programs, Persistent adopted a unified approach that aligned ingestion, processing, governance and quality frameworks across both use cases. This ensured consistency, scalability and transparency across the entire data lifecycle.
Modernizing the Risk Data Mart for Scalable Analytics & Compliance
To address limitations in the existing reporting environment, Persistent designed a Databricks‑based Risk Data Mart capable of scaling with evolving business and regulatory needs. The solution enabled the migration of data from the legacy on‑premise data warehouse to Azure, supporting both historical and incremental data loads.
Key capabilities included:
- Distributed data processing using PySpark on Azure Databricks, that could handle large datasets efficiently
- Ingestion from multiple on‑premise source systems with change capture
- Integrated data quality and audit controls to improve transparency and compliance
- Power BI dashboards enabling multi‑dimensional risk and finance reporting
The modernized Risk Data Mart provided business users with faster access to insights while strengthening regulatory readiness and audit confidence.
Building a Trusted Customer Golden Record (eCIF) at Enterprise Scale
In parallel with the Risk Data Mart modernization, Persistent implemented a Databricks‑powered eCIF platform to address long‑standing customer data fragmentation challenges. The solution consolidated customer data from 21+ source systems, covering 339+ attributes and applied trust‑score‑based logic to identify the most reliable value for each attribute.
Core capabilities included:
- Standardization, de‑duplication and consolidation of customer records
- Trust‑score evaluation to determine authoritative customer attributes (e.g., KYC, contact details, identifiers)
- Generation of a single golden record per customer in JSON format
- Kafka‑based streaming to enable near real‑time data delivery to downstream applications
- Multi‑layer reconciliation and embedded data quality checks
The solution enabled the client to handle more than 7+ crore customer records, supporting both analytical and operational workloads.
Business Outcomes That Scale With the Enterprise
The unified data modernization program delivered measurable outcomes across efficiency, compliance and scalability, enabling the financial institution to achieve:
- 60–70% improvement in process execution turnaround time
- Significant reduction in manual effort and data‑related errors
- Improved regulatory readiness and ability to address audit observations
- Creation of a single, trusted customer view across the enterprise
- Faster, near real‑time data availability for downstream systems
- A future‑ready, cost‑efficient cloud data platform aligned with long‑term growth
Laying the Foundation for a Data-Driven Future
By combining Persistent’s deep expertise in data engineering and platform modernization with the scalable Data Lake architecture of Databricks, the client successfully transitioned from a legacy, on‑premise data ecosystem to a modern, cloud‑native enterprise data platform.
The engagement not only addressed immediate risk reporting and customer data challenges but also established a flexible, future‑ready foundation to support evolving analytics, regulatory and business needs. With a unified approach to governance, quality and scalability, the organization is now well positioned to build advanced data‑driven capabilities on top of a trusted core.
Delivered jointly by Persistent Systems and Databricks, the solution demonstrates how large financial institutions can unlock value through modern cloud-native data platforms, driving efficiency, confidence and growth in an increasingly data-centric world.
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