Open Data Lakehouse
Financial Services
Hungary
OTP Bank Group is Hungary’s largest commercial bank and one of the largest independent financial services providers in Central and Eastern Europe, with nearly 40,000 employees in 11 countries. The Group provides universal financial services for private individuals and corporate clients to around 17 million customers through more than 1,300 branches.
Facilitating AI for banking innovation
Innovation is one of OTP Bank’s core strategic pillars. Early on, the bank recognized the potential of AI and machine learning to enhance its operational efficiency and customer experience. To fuel the adoption of AI and enable teams throughout the business to actively explore data analytics use cases, OTP Bank established an AI Center of Excellence.
To support its business goals, OTP Bank needed to create a robust data foundation for AI exploration. Doing this at scale presented a challenge because the Group generates a huge volume of banking, operational and customer data. Volumes have further increased as the Group has acquired subsidiaries across Central and Eastern Europe. Security and governance were key requirements; OTP Bank operates in a highly regulated industry and must comply with regional regulations around data storage.
Using Cloudera, OTP Bank has built an open data lakehouse that enables its business teams to access and analyze data at scale.
“Cloudera has helped OTP Bank adapt to its increasingly complex data ecosystem and achieve our strategic goal of getting business teams the right data at the right time,” comments Lotar Schin, Lead of AI Center of Excellence, OTP Bank.
Building a flexible, open data lakehouse
With Cloudera, OTP Bank can store up to 5 billion records per day from multiple sources, amounting to 3 petabytes of data, in a centralized location. The open source nature of Cloudera’s platform allows the Group’s teams to deploy whichever analytics tools they choose to query large amounts of structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data and unlock insights faster.
While currently deployed on-premises, Cloudera’s flexible data environment can be deployed across any infrastructure, giving the bank the flexibility to migrate to the public cloud in the future. Additionally, Cloudera’s Shared Data Experience (SDX) means OTP Bank’s data environment is secure by design, delivering integrated and consistent data context.
“Cloudera gives us end-to-end security from the point when data comes into the infrastructure to when our data scientists begin analysis. It’s also a future-proof solution. Without knowing whether we will stay on-premises or move to the public cloud, Cloudera gives us the freedom of choice.” adds Schin.
The heart of AI and analytics projects
Today, Cloudera is at the heart of OTP Bank’s data analytics projects. Cloudera Machine Learning gives the Group the resources needed to experiment, iterate, and operationalize AI across the business with transparent and repeatable workflows that work for everyone. Almost all of OTP Bank’s business teams now use the platform to access data and fuel better decision-making. The risk team is a particular champion. Since all customer, operational, and financial data is in one place, it’s easy for the team to analyze anomalies that indicate business risk and take necessary mitigation steps.
With the secure data foundation provided by Cloudera, OTP Bank has cemented its reputation as an AI leader in the region. As a result, the bank has been invited to build a Large Language Model (LLM) for the Hungarian language, supported by the Hungarian Ministry of Innovation. OTP Bank is collaborating with universities in Hungary to pre-train the model based on public data, with a plan to make the LLM available to all Hungarian companies in the future.
