Financial data integration delivers trusted data in banking
- 4.4M Individual customers
- 200K+ Business clients
- $22.5B Total assets
Founded in 2008, Alior Bank has successfully grown its portfolio organically and through merger and acquisition (M&A) activities. The bank aims to be the bank of everyday life and the future. To accomplish this, Alior Bank empowers teams with data to innovate like a startup with the stability and trust of a public institution—demonstrated by a strong brand and top recommendation rates from 18-to-29-year-olds, a segment with strong buying power.
“Alior Bank is an innovative bank known for our modern IT solutions,” says Mariusz Klys, data department director at Alior Bank. “As a result, we’re one of the largest banks in Poland, serving 4.4 million individual customers and over 200,000 business clients, and with over 90 billion Polish złoty (approximately $22.5 billion) in total assets.
“We need to ensure that our data is treated as a strategic asset aligned with Alior’s mission of becoming the preferred financial partner for everyday needs and long-term financial goals,” Klys continues. “This means having reliable data and skilled people who know how to use and manage data.”
Alior Bank’s effective use of data supports key financial analytics use cases:
- Finance. Integrated financial insights create an Analytical General Ledger, which is the central repository of analytical data related to the bank’s balance sheet and financial performance.
“Alior performs Funds Transfer Pricing to calculate profitability and measure the performance of various business units within the bank,” says Klys. “Additionally, a standard cost-of-risk engine calculates profit on the transaction, considering the individual customer risk, and a Capital Adequacy Directive calculation engine allows for the inclusion of capital allocation to individual business lines in the profitability calculation.” - Regulation and compliance. “As a European bank, we must comply and report to the National Bank of Poland, Polish Financial Supervision Authority, European Banking Authority, Polish Bank Guarantee Fund, and Polish Stock Exchange, among others,” says Klys.
“Core applications rely on Teradata to support operational risk, anti-money laundering (AML), Know-Your-Customer (KYC) requirements, and financial reporting of financial statements,” he continues. - Customer experience and personalization. Customer relationship management (CRM) teams depend on Teradata VantageCloud on Microsoft Azure as the trusted data source for operational and analytical CRM efforts, as well as advanced machine learning (ML) models and artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots.
“Teradata plays a crucial role in building customer trust,” Klys shares. “Reliable, standardized data allows us to provide personalized financial advice and tailor products to our customers’ needs throughout their financial journeys. This trusted information not only strengthens the customer relationship, but also positions the bank as a trusted advisor.”
A trusted financial data foundation drives more informed decisions
Financial services chief financial officers (CFOs) and finance departments face time-consuming and costly operations in integrating, reconciling, and managing data to meet financial and regulatory reporting requirements. Data privacy and consumer protection laws, particularly those regulating the use of AI/ML, pose additional challenges. But the biggest industry challenge is data quality. How can you trust data coming from many sources? What data is the most current and accurate? Is it secure and governed so that insights can be trusted from a single source of truth?
“It’s important that the data we process is reliable and that we can trust it, particularly when integrating data from various sources,” Klys explains. “This involves a robust data governance framework that encompasses data quality management. By centralizing and standardizing data in Teradata VantageCloud on Azure, we not only improve our operational efficiency, but also enhance decision-making capabilities across the organization.”
A financial data foundation provides access, visibility, and the ability to reconcile data across the organization into a single, trusted, and auditable source. With the financial data foundation from Teradata, Alior Bank:
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Accelerates time to insights and operates the business with agility through faster and more accurate insights
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Enables a deeper, multidimensional view of the organization through operational data at a granular level
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Reduces manual analysis and errors through automation, enabling multiple users to tap into existing work with speed and accuracy
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Creates an environment designed for emerging AI/ML applications that power future business decisions
“Teradata supports compliance by centralizing our data and providing comprehensive data governance practices,” says Klys. “The Analytical General Ledger is the foundation for our analytical financial data. We save time to reconcile and publish reports, which allows us to provide data to authorities significantly faster and with less human effort.
By integrating transaction and translatory data in Teradata VantageCloud on Azure, Alior Bank enhances accuracy and efficiency while proactively addressing regulatory updates. Most importantly, says Klys, the bank “not only meets regulatory obligations more effectively and on time, but maintains our stakeholders’ trust.”
Alior Bank successfully automates data acquisition and data management. Trusted data in VantageCloud supports integrated financial insights, an integrated general ledger, profitability analytics modeling, and advanced finance modeling with full data traceability. The finance analytic framework empowers Alior Bank’s use cases for financial reporting, regulatory and statutory reporting, compliance and risk, customer and product profitability, advanced fraud analytics, and more.
VantageCloud on Azure powers faster innovation
Alior Bank’s modern IT is trailblazing in Poland, becoming the first large-scale financial institution to migrate from on-premises data warehouses to the public cloud. To do so, Alior Bank partnered with Microsoft and Teradata to build a modern cloud analytics and data platform and ecosystem to support the use of AI/ML.
“The most important reason for moving to the cloud was the growth of Alior Bank and increasing requirements for elastic computing power and storage,” says Klys. “By allowing our infrastructure to grow and automate processes, data now helps us to provide better services to our customers, mitigate compliance risks, streamline operations, and maintain transparency with regulatory authorities.”
After migrating over 90 terabytes of data, over 1,000 users, and 3,000 processes, VantageCloud on Azure brings new efficiencies and competitiveness.
Cloud scalability enables Alior Bank to launch new initiatives in data processing and analytics using large amounts of data that require advanced computing power and tools available only in the public cloud.
While emerging use cases in AI using large language models (LLMs) will require massive volumes of data, Alior Bank already holds large amounts of data in VantageCloud and Azure Blob Storage. Alior Bank uses VantageCloud’s native object store capability to read and write into the low-cost object storage.
“We need to keep data for several years,” says Klys. “The longer the history, the better. We place data in VantageCloud and use the native object store to connect to Azure Blob Storage for colder data that we don’t need to access every day. This allows us to further optimize costs.”
The Polish Financial Supervision Authority requires a “stressed exit” strategy as part of business continuity plans. To ensure that sudden, unplanned disruptions don’t impact core customer services, flexible hybrid and multi-cloud solutions are crucial. VantageCloud is unique in the market for its agility, flexibility, and choice in critical infrastructure decisions.
“Teradata makes it possible to return to on premises, and this is crucial from the legal point of view of having an ‘exit’ strategy,” says Klys. “We want to be multi-cloud and avoid vendor lock-in. VantageCloud provides that flexibility of being multi-cloud and hybrid if we need to revert to on premises or change cloud service providers in the course of exercising our business continuity plans.”
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