Team members:
Jon Hill, Director, Data Analytics, with:
- Stephanie Wong
- Naunghton Williams
- Kanwal Nain Singh
- Saeon Piremakumar
- Vandana Gudwani
Country: United Kingdom
Organization: Macquarie Group Limited
Macquarie is a global financial services group operating in 34 markets in asset management, retail and business banking, wealth management, leasing and asset financing, market access, commodity trading, renewables development, specialist advisory, capital raising, and principal investment. The diversity of our operations, combined with a strong capital position and robust risk management framework, has contributed to our 53-year record of unbroken profitability.
Awards Categories:
- Best MLOps Use Case
- Best Approach for Building Trust in AI
Business Challenge:
Dataiku was already in broad use for pre-trade analytics across Macquarie Group’s Commodities and Global Markets (CGM) business. However, a gap in embedded governance and control functionality limited the applicability of the platform when it came to important operational processes within our highly regulated industry.
Further, technology applications that supported important operational processes relied heavily on specialist technology team expertise to act as a conduit between the platforms and the internal end-users of the data sitting in CGM.
As a business, CGM has a strong track record partnering with clients, understanding their needs and providing tailored solutions. There was a strong appetite to further extend and develop our digital capabilities to support this, working in partnership with Technology and leveraging advanced analytics to drive revenue and scale product offerings.
Our challenge was three-fold, to deliver:
- Controlled, governed workflows that aligned with business needs for agility and scalability.
- Automated solutions which provided confidence in our tooling, team and processes, in a way that enabled self-service and reduced or removed the organisation dependency on Technology.
- A solution that supports simplification of our data tooling.
Business Solution:
Having used Dataiku at scale for pre-trade analytics, the team at Macquarie leveraged this experience to unlock our ability to use Dataiku for operationally important workloads. Most significantly, this meant we extended the use of Dataiku in ways previously not envisioned, to satisfy the business need for autonomous, governed access to trade data.
How? Working closely with Dataiku for integrated data governance through the introduction of Dataiku Govern, meant we could confidently push to production and test all changes and developments at our desired pace. The resulting platform serves as an aggregation and modeling layer, enabling us to bring in trade data from different businesses, systems, and regions, producing metrics and anomaly reports for our control functions.
Prior to Dataiku Govern, the lack of embedded governance prevented us from leveraging Dataiku for these use cases. Solving this challenge by extending use of Dataiku means we are leveraging the functionality of an established advanced data analytics platform against a backdrop of continual improvement of our control environment.
Further, through the low to no-code solution provided through Dataiku, CGM stakeholders are now empowered to own the majority of risk-related tasks without a dependency on the Tech organisation. This supports greater autonomy amongst individuals who know the business and increased speed of our delivery cycle in a governed, streamlined and transparent way.
More on the technology approach: The quality and accuracy of data is critical in enabling business agility for data automation, analytics and reporting for operationally important workloads. As a result, the right level of assurance and controls are needed to permit workloads to be built on Dataiku. To support the project, Dataiku is integrated with a cloud data warehouse. We adopted an iterative approach, solving input by input, given the global diversity of our business and industry. This methodology proved effective in simplifying our solution.
Day-to-day Change:
The solution is a key enabler in meeting regulatory obligations, promoting confidence in our processes for analysis, monitoring and reporting, and ensuring data is protected. Through trusted, accessible, governed data, the business is competitive in a fast-moving industry, can respond to evolving regulatory requirements quickly and realise efficiencies in time and cost.
Through Dataiku, we have met the business challenges that were posed. With the introduction of Govern, we are now able to move our operationally critical and important workloads across and shift from IT-dependent to business-driven and owned outcomes, increasing the agility and speed of change without compromising governance.
The benefits for our organisation are:
- From IT-dependent to business-driven: Ability to complete tasks at a business level in a highly governed, controlled manner.
- Increased agility and shorter lines of communication: Removed multiple layers of description and interpretation so those who want to make the changes can directly implement them. This streamlined process ensures the end result aligns more closely with the original intent.
- Improved user experience: Ability to make changes directly empowers business users to take direct ownership and receive direct feedback on changes and developments that they make.
- Increased efficiency and response time: Adoption of a business-driven approach has resulted in a faster time to market. With reduced dependencies on intermediaries, our team can respond more quickly to clients and regulators and bring new products to production in a shorter timeframe.
Business Area Enhanced: Risk/Compliance/Legal/Internal Audit
Use Case Stage: In Progress
Value Generated:
With the inclusion of Dataiku “Govern”, Macquarie has been able to leverage advanced data platforms beyond the traditional analytics space and within operationally important area. Use in these areas require the additional controls and governance capabilities of Govern to ensure data is trusted: that is, accurate, complete, timely and accessible.
We have confidence that data product outputs are of a very high quality and our business can make decisions based on that output.
- Strengthens already robust risk profile: Ability to react faster when there’s a regulatory or compliance requirement or a new product, and to add controls or functionality to our downstream data more quickly.
- Cost savings through the removal of manual processes: IT system changes can take several months to implement, during which period, a considerable amount of work would be done manually over Excel. This approach supports faster change by combining the speed and business development of Excel with the control and scale of IT system changes.
- Further improved our time to production: Upskiling business people to work with modern data tooling has allowed Macquarie to reduce the time it takes to get changes and improvements into production, meeting client, compliance and business requirements more quickly.
- Supports decision making: Ability to leverage trusted data to enable modelling, supports decision making and ability to provide our end clients with new products/services, faster.
- Extension of an established partnership: Leveraging the use of Dataiku Govern supports alignment and efficiency in our data tooling.
Value Brought by Dataiku:
With embedded governance controls, Dataiku is being used as the business data transformation platform to:
- Source data that meets industry standards.
- Provide a consistent trade representation of products to consumers of that data.
- Unlock usage for operationally important DataOps workloads.
- Implement an enhanced control framework and analytics capabilities through the use of Govern for critical/important use cases.
- Support the iterative release of capabilities through a test framework.
- Bring in complex changes that would traditionally have required a greater number of technology resources.
We also were able to upskill our business team to use Dataiku through training and support with a dedicated Dataiku Partner, leveraging their skills and experience to further speed the upskilling process.
Value Type:
- Improve customer/employee satisfaction
- Increase trust
