For decades, the volume, variety, and rate of growth of consumer and transaction data was relatively small.

However, with the advent of the internet and online services, a new and global business model driven by new applications and constant innovation has produced data for billions of consumers.

Banks, brokers and financial services are demanding modern, unified data solutions to handle the continuously growing volume of data, including structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data. To grow their business, banks want to be data-driven, and therefore need to modernize their data architecture to provide agile, fit-for-purpose data services for both small and big data.

Disruptive data forces such as big data and data cloud stimulate new ways of thinking and empower organizations to dismantle silos and collaborate within a democratic and rapidly changing data ecosystem.

Data architecture is moving beyond organizational boundaries and shifting its focus from “keeping the lights on” (operational data and business intelligence) to providing game-changing insights gleaned from untapped big data.

At the heart of insight-driven banking is a modern data environment anchored in a fit-for-purpose data architecture model called modern data platform (MDP). The modern data platform combines a wide range of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure services that ingest, process, store, serve, and visualize data from structured and unstructured sources.

The MDP architecture demonstrates how a single, unified data platform can meet most common requirements for:

1. Traditional relational data pipelines
2. Big data transformations
3. Unstructured data ingestion and enrichment with AI-based functions
4. Stream ingestion and processing using the Lambda architecture
5. Serving insights for data-driven applications and rich data visualization
6. Establishing an enterprise-wide data single source of truth for your data, consisting of a data warehouse for structured data, and a data lake for semi-structured and unstructured data
7. Integrating relational data sources with other unstructured data sets by using big data processing technologies
8. Using semantic modeling and powerful visualization tools to simplify data analysis

When implementing solutions using the modern data platform, follow best practices for advanced data processing systems, such as using a relational database management system (RDBMS) for structured data and big data processing for unstructured data.

When designing the solution, keep the following considerations in mind:

• Provide for both batch and streaming data use cases
• Incorporate artificial intelligence and machine learning use-cases for analytics workloads
• Incorporate assurance for data quality, data versioning, and data lineage
• Include integration with on-premises as well as other cloud infrastructures to support multicloud and hybrid scenarios

The modern data platform is a single, unified data platform that you can use to set up an enterprise-wide data hub to serve as a single source of truth to meet most common data requirements.

• Fit-for-Purpose: Build a modern data architecture or platform that fits your architecture needs today and positions your organization to capitalize on opportunities in the information management space as they arise.
• Incremental Improvement: Building a mature and optimized enterprise modern data platform won’t occur overnight – it will take time and effort. Use our diagnostic assessment, accelerators, and best practices to help you assess current data architecture capabilities, identify target modern data goals, and design initiatives that allow you to close the gaps between them.
• Maintain Business Alignment: As you build your modern data solutions, consider your strategic vision and priorities. A common failure of traditional data architecture is that the initiatives within them often fail, or fail to provide clear business value. Keeping your initiative plans aligned with business requirements and considerations will help to garner buy-in and to prove the value of modern data architecture as well ass the larger more strategic initiatives on your road map.