Modern data architecture: A foundation for banking innovation and growth

Bank of Georgia is the first bank from the Caucasus region to receive a premium listing on the London Stock Exchange. It is one of the largest employers in Georgia, supporting customers’ loan portfolios, deposits, assets, and stocks and shares. Today, Bank of Georgia has more than 1.5 million monthly active digital users and up to 99% of all transactions are conducted through remote channels.

Centralizing data and tools to facilitate growth

Bank of Georgia adopted a data-driven strategy from its inception. Its ability to analyze data to better understand customer needs is core to its operations. As it has grown, the volume of customer and financial data that resides within the bank has increased significantly. At the same time, Bank of Georgia has expanded its use of open source tools across its analytics, data management, and developer functions. 

The bank recognized that it needed to centralize and integrate its data into a single location to streamline operations, accelerate product development, and support advanced analytics. Robust security was also critical to meet regulatory requirements and data privacy mandates. With a DataOps team of four, the bank sought a platform that required less of their time and resources to build and manage integrations with its current technology environment.

Bank of Georgia selected Cloudera to build a secure and modern on-premises data architecture with support of a local partner, HT Solutions (HTS) to meet these needs.

“Cloudera has provided us with modern data architecture that will support our continued growth – ensuring that we remain a data-driven businesses and delivering a foundation for future innovation.” Vazha Mantua, IT Director/Core IT & Data, Bank of Georgia 

An intelligent and flexible platform

Cloudera, HTS and Bank of Georgia worked together to implement Cloudera as a central platform for the bank’s customer and financial data. The bank now has a centralized open data lakehouse that can scale rapidly to integrate data from multiple sources. This includes significant volumes of data from Bank of Georgia’s digital platforms, with 1.4 million monthly active digital users and 66% of all transactions conducted through its banking applications.

Cloudera’s out-of-the-box functionality simplified what could have been numerous complex integrations with Bank of Georgia’s existing toolset. The bank previously used more than 15 open source products for data streaming from databases, including Oracle, Elastic Search and MongoDB, and for Extract, Transform and Load (ELT) processes. Cloudera’s open architecture and interoperability meant that Bank of Georgia’s team did not have to spend time manually building data pipelines or integrations, and they now stream data into the lakehouse with Apache Spark.

As part of Bank of Georgia’s business continuity strategy, it implemented Cloudera in its passive and active data centers. This gave the bank greater confidence in its disaster recovery plans and has enabled the DataOps team to establish a new secure testing environment.  

“The key to success in this project was our close collaboration with Cloudera to deliver a tailored solution that enables Bank of Georgia to meet its business goals. And as local partner, we were on hand to support the bank quickly if help was needed to ensure a seamless and secure transition.” Nino Gvazava, CEO of HT Solutions 

“Cloudera’s out-of-the-box capabilities take integration pressure off our teams because it is truly integrated from a data security and governance perspective. The simplicity and speed of set-up lets us focus on adding value by serving data to the rest of the business.” Vazha Pirtskhalaishvili, Head of DevOps and DataOps Engineering, Bank of Georgia.

Data accessibility drives new product development 

With a modern data architecture, Bank of Georgia has much greater accessibility to its information assets. The DataOps team now serve data on demand to more than 80 line-of-business users that it supports. The open data lakehouse incorporates new data from multiple sources in real-time, ensuring the bank never misses important insights and enabling the team to perform advanced analytics with the most recent data. 

By unlocking the value of its customer and financial data, Bank of Georgia has been able to develop many new use cases. These include gaining a 360-degree view of its customers for deeper insight into their behavior, powering personalized offers and services to customers, and making better product recommendations to customers across all its channels.

Additionally, Cloudera’s secure-by-design ethos gives the bank assurance that its data is secured everywhere, as well as providing the backbone for its new data governance policy. The new secure testing environment has also accelerated the pace of innovation at the bank, enabling the DataOps team to experiment completely separately from the production environment and develop new data services and products rapidly.