Macquarie: Powering Risk Management With Dataiku Govern

Within Macquarie Group’s Commodities and Global Markets (CGM) business, there was a strong appetite to further extend and develop their digital capabilities, working in partnership with the IT team and leveraging advanced analytics to drive revenue and scale product offerings. Their challenge was therefore threefold, to deliver:

1. Controlled, governed workflows that aligned with business needs for agility and scalability.
2. Automated solutions which provided confidence in their tooling, team, and processes, in a way that enabled self-service and reduced or removed the organizational dependency on IT.
3. A solution that supports simplification of their data tooling.

See how Dataiku Govern — a single place where data and analytics leaders and project managers track the progress of multiple data projects — helped solve these challenges and more.

From IT-Dependent to Business Driven

Dataiku is a key enabler in helping Macquarie meet regulatory obligations, promoting confidence in their processes for analysis, monitoring, and reporting, as well as 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 realize efficiencies in time and cost.

With the introduction of Dataiku Govern, Macquarie is now able to move their 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 Macquarie include:

• Moving from IT-dependent to business-driven: Dataiku gave the team the ability to complete tasks at a business level in a highly governed, controlled manner.
• Increased agility and drove shorter lines of communication: The platform 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: The ability to make changes directly empowers business users to take ownership and receive feedback on changes and developments that they make.

Enhancing Data Product Outputs With Dataiku

With Dataiku Govern, Macquarie has been able to leverage advanced data platforms beyond the traditional analytics space and within operationally important areas. 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. 

Dataiku serves as an aggregation and modeling layer, enabling Macquarie CGM to bring in trade data from different businesses, systems, and regions, producing metrics and anomaly reports for their control functions. 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. The Macquarie CGM team adopted an iterative approach, solving input by input, given the global diversity of their business and industry. This methodology proved effective in simplifying their solution.

The team at Macquarie has confidence that data product outputs are of a very high quality and their business can make decisions based on that output. Using Dataiku Govern:

• Strengthens their already robust risk profile: The team can react faster when there’s a regulatory or compliance requirement or a new product and can add controls or functionality to their downstream data more quickly.
• Drives cost savings through the removal of manual processes: IT system changes can take several months to implement, during which 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 improves time to production: Upskilling 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: Macquarie now has the ability to leverage trusted data to enable modeling, which supports decision making and the ability to provide their clients with new products and services, faster.
• Extends an established partnership: Leveraging the use of Dataiku Govern supports alignment and efficiency in Macquarie’s data tooling.

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, and unlock usage for operationally important DataOps workloads.

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 IT organization. This supports greater autonomy amongst individuals who know the business and increased speed of the delivery cycle in a governed, streamlined, and transparent way.

Through the use of Dataiku Govern, Macquarie CGM has been able to implement an enhanced control framework and bring in complex changes that would have traditionally required a greater number of technology resources. Macquarie was also able to upskill their 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.