Harnessing the Power of Centralized Data Analytics in the Cloud

Harnessing the Power of Centralized Data Analytics in the Cloud

Nord/LB is one of Germany’s leading commercial banks. As an institute under public law, it is part of the S-Finance Group and is a nationally system-relevant bank. For more than four decades, Nord/LB has been a market leader among corporate, institutional, and public-sector customers, and is one of the foremost financiers of renewable energies. 

Unlocking the value of data assets 

As a large financial institution, Nord/LB generates huge volumes of banking, operational and customer data, while also ingesting data from external sources such as Bloomberg. Nord/LB recognized the potential to create value from these information assets, so sought to unlock insights, break down data silos, and build data products for its internal business teams, including risk, sales, and trading departments. 

To do this, Nord/LB decided to undertake a transformational project to move its data analytics function to the cloud. The core aim of moving from a legacy environment was to create a single data management platform, enabling a stronger data-driven strategy that facilitated advanced analytics and machine learning projects. However, with a small data analytics team of 15 people, and against the backdrop of a heavily regulated German banking industry, Nord/LB needed to be certain its cloud migration satisfied strict regional legislation around data governance and utilization. 

To achieve its goal and ensure data security and compliance, Nord/LB adopted Cloudera on Azure. 

Empowering the business with a data lakehouse

Nord/LB’s on-premises data platform was migrated to Cloudera on Azure with the expert support of Cloudera’s Professional Services Team. Cloudera now acts as a centralized data lakehouse specifically for Nord/LB’s advanced data analytics operations, enabling the bank to collate data from multiple sources and provide a backbone to build data products. Sources include its internal data warehouses, trading systems, contracts, and customer data, alongside external trading intelligence and news, and information from web scraping services. Using Cloudera’s integration with Apache Iceberg, Nord/LB now has the ability to query its large sets of structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data in a much more efficient way.

In addition, by moving to the public cloud Nord/LB has increased its speed of innovation as its data analytics team has been freed from the burden of managing on-premises infrastructure. They can now quickly spin up additional storage and compute as required, with new users being onboarded to the data platform in just a couple of hours, compared to the weeks or months it did previously.

Importantly, Nord/LB can be confident that with Cloudera SDX it has robust data governance and security in place across the organization. With this state-of-the-art data foundation in place, Nord/LB’s internal data practitioners can also now experiment safely and build proof-of-concept products in a safe and isolated manner. 

New data products to meet banking regulations and harness AI

Through adopting Cloudera, Nord/LB has consolidated its existing data analytics tooling as it is now available out of the box. For example, using Cloudera Data Engineering, Nord/LB can automate data workloads and pipelines using Apache Airflow natively. This saves considerable time and unlocks valuable insights for risk, sales, and trading teams through the creation of new data products. In only a matter of months, Nord/LB has built products such as a CO2 accounting tool and banking stress test on the Cloudera platform.

When new banking regulations were introduced in Germany, Nord/LB had to update around 7,000 contracts in multiple languages, with each contract containing hundreds of pages. With Cloudera in place to support machine learning, the bank could apply Natural Language Processing (NLP) to the contracts to minimize manual efforts. By automating the analysis of contracts, Nord/LB could then easily identify changes. Additional complexity came from the need to connect contracts to banking transactions and customer information, which meant joining unstructured and structured data. A new dashboard was created to give the team the ability to easily manage the project.  

Cloudera also provides Nord/LB with the foundation to leverage artificial intelligence (AI) and large language models (LLM). Nord/LB has built an AI-based trading bot which provides traders with real-time recommendations based on live and historical data, helping them determine the optimal price to buy or sell. In addition, Nord/LB is currently undertaking the incorporation of Large Language Models (such as GPT) into its platform, with the goal of creating data products driven by these advanced models.

Looking to the future, Nord/LB plans to continue expanding its use of Cloudera to support business teams across sales, financial markets, banking, risk control and wholesale loans. This is in line with the company’s ultimate vision of making data accessible to everyone in the organization.