Leading Latin America Into an Open Finance Future
Faster time-to-market for new features
Analytics and AI use cases
Users accessing data insights
With fundamental shifts — from the ubiquity of mobile fintech to the advent of open finance across institutions — the finance industry is in exciting flux. Banco Bradesco understood that meeting evolving customer expectations with better financial solutions was a key priority. Unfortunately, Banco Bradesco’s legacy data warehouse was too cumbersome to share customer data with other entities. With customer, transactional and consent data scattered across disjointed systems, causing a lack of collaboration for proper data analysis and AI, their existing environment created too many obstacles to fully embrace open finance and the move to become a cloud-first bank. With the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform, Banco Bradesco created new paths to provide the personalized experiences their customers want on their journey toward financial prosperity.
On-premises too rigid for digital transformation initiatives
The banking industry is undergoing a significant transformation. Open finance initiatives are introducing new business models that give customers more access to their financial data from bank accounts, mortgages, investments, insurance, and utility payments across financial entities. Governments in South America have quickly adopted these open finance standards, requiring financial institutions to securely share customer financial data to help paint a complete picture of the customer. With this added insight into a customer’s financial landscape across institutions, banks are tapping into analytics and AI to deliver seamless and personalized customer experiences across financial institutions and platforms. “With more visibility into our customers, we have the opportunity to deliver products and services that meet them wherever they are in their financial journey,” explained Pedro Antonio Boareto, Open Finance Lead of Engineering at Banco Bradesco.
However, the bank’s legacy on-premises infrastructure needed to improve to overcome the technical barriers of sharing 20+ terabytes of customer financial data with outside organizations. “The emergence of fintech companies has shifted customer expectations with better digital experiences,” said Rafael Romualdo Wandresen, Senior Data Manager at Banco Bradesco. “To compete and meet these higher customer expectations, we had to remove limitations in our data infrastructure.”
For example, rolling out new applications with over 1,000 siloed databases would take months, making deployment inefficient. Engineers struggled to complete projects, as they were inundated with IT operations work to maintain their infrastructure. And analysts needed help accessing and exploring data promptly, dependent on an overburdened engineering team to provide curated data and reports. As they modernized to the cloud, Banco Bradesco knew they needed a solution that provided a data architecture that could unify all their data and make it easily accessible to team stakeholders to analyze the customer experience better and drive tangible improvements. They also needed the flexibility for engineers to deploy new personalized finance products more rapidly to drive new initiatives.
Lakehouse architecture unlocks the potential of open finance
Transitioning to the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform began with Banco Bradesco’s Open Finance initiative. “We have a broad financial services portfolio, including exchange, credit cards, payments, financing, loans, etc. With the lakehouse, we can unify the data from these multiple sources and streamline access for analytics and machine learning,” said Vanessa Aparecida de Oliveira Ramalho, Data Manager at Banco Bradesco. Under the hood, the lakehouse architecture’s robust capabilities played a crucial role in accelerating Banco Bradesco’s ability to use data analytics and AI to deliver customer value where it mattered most.
Delta Lake provides the foundation to build fast ETL pipelines for analytics and ML. Databricks Workflows allows Banco Bradesco’s data analyst teams to easily create, run, monitor and repair data pipelines without running any infrastructure. With Delta Live Tables, their engineering team benefits from auto-optimization and lineage of data pipelines. And Unity Catalog helps them securely and easily share data, setting the stage for drastically better data analytics across their teams.
That exploration delivers many insights that translate to customer value. Banco Bradesco’s Relationship Manager Cockpit product provides internal teams visibility into customer consent and finance data from other institutions so they can build better products for customers’ needs. The bank has also developed a mobile application that consolidates customers’ financial accounts across different banks, giving them a single view of their financial life. With open finance data, Banco Bradesco’s BRAIN (Bradesco Business Intelligence Decisioning Platform) project, which is responsible for providing credit solutions in near real-time, quickly improves the accuracy of pre-approved loan financing. Moreover, analysts use Databricks SQL to run queries and visualize data through business intelligence dashboards for executives to make smarter strategic decisions around open finance.
Unifying open data to discover new financial possibilities
With the lakehouse architecture underpinning Banco Bradesco’s enterprise data platform, they can firmly lead Latin America’s financial industry into an open finance future. “The Databricks Data Intelligence Platform is a consistent and relevant solution pattern used by over 200 data analysts across 180 use cases and growing as we introduce more data and new AI initiatives,” said Boareto.
With more than 60 active ETL pipelines sending data to Banco Bradesco’s different AI initiatives, their team can now build solutions leveraging ML from financial data 24x faster — reducing development times of new applications from 2 days to less than 2 hours. And the fruits of this newfound efficiency are already having a material impact on the business. One such solution has accelerated the analysis time of customer loans from months to minutes, allowing the company to change pre-approved credit limits nearly on demand.
Banco Bradesco has plans for continued innovations across their organization using data, analytics and AI. With a modern and unified lakehouse, Banco Bradesco can set their sights on more ways to extract insights from their data for more customer value.
