Barclays is a major global financial services provider with an extensive international presence in Europe, the USA, Africa and Asia. With over 300 years of history and expertise in banking, Barclays operates in over 50 countries and employs over 155,000 people. Barclays moves, lends, invests and protects money for over 48 million customers and clients worldwide.
With new government regulations on the horizon, Barclays chose to take a proactive approach to compliance with an enterprise data governance program. The primary driver for the project was to assure the quality of data ultimately reported to regulators and to demonstrate a robust, transparent and accountable process for generating regulatory reports in respect of the Basel II Capital Adequacy Directive. Additionally there were several areas where Barclays wanted to improve operational efficiency through data management:
Barclays deployed DataFlux technology as a central resource that monitors and reports on the quality of data across an extensive enterprise data warehouse environment. Using the award-winning GUI based design environment of the DataFlux data quality and data integration platform, business users at Barclays were able to easily design customisable business rules to govern data. DataFlux profiling and monitoring technology provided the ability for Barclays to understand its existing data assets and report on the quality of its data over time – a critical element for accurate and reliable regulatory reporting.
Kingsley James, senior data analyst, Barclays said, “Technically this solution allows us to easily profile and monitor our data, which has been extracted from more than 30 source systems and 12 million customer records. It’s a powerful capability we didn’t have before.”
Additionally, Barclays selected the DataFlux technology to allow its business users to compare and contrast disparate data sets. It also allowed users to set thresholds of acceptability and weight the importance of different data fields, adding organization-specific context to Barclays’ data quality reports.
When developing its data governance framework, Barclays involved a wide range of business stakeholders to define policy and implement a documented process. The company has now proactively met the need to comply with its regulatory data quality needs. Working within existing IT infrastructure parameters and integrating seamlessly with Barclays data warehouse applications, the bank has utilized DataFlux to add crucial data governance controls resulting in a fully assured process for regulatory reporting.
Pankaj Mistry, head of data governance, UK Retail Risk, Barclays commented, “This project has enabled us to deliver high standards of data quality in our critical regulatory processes.”
Just six months after deploying the DataFlux solution at an enterprisewide level, the project has achieved a positive ROI and has enabled Barclays to reduce its annual IT integration costs by £500,000 when compared to tactical data management deployments. This innovation has enabled Barclays to respond more quickly in the event of suspected credit card fraud and improve operational efficiency.
Additionally, the project has enabled Barclays to better understand its 50,000 buy-to-let customers that hold mortgages. The company can now analyze this customer base identifying interrelationships between the individual customers, mortgages and properties. This process provides Barclays with the ability to better manage the risks associated with making multiple loans to the same individual. The project is planned to go even further to improve the quality of Barclays customer contact data which will increase the rate at which the operations division is able to reach customers on the first occasion.