The Customer: Who they are
A regional bank with a growing corporate lending book, preparing to migrate its core banking platform to the cloud within 18 months.
The Challenge: Identifying the villain
Three separate M&A-era systems held overlapping customer and product records, with no agreed single source of truth. “We couldn’t tell our regulator with confidence which customer record was authoritative,” said the bank’s Head of Data Governance. With DORA enforcement approaching, the risk was no longer theoretical — it was audit-ready or not.
The Journey: The search for a solution
The bank first tried to fix data quality issues inside the migration project itself, treating governance as a side-task for the migration team. Six weeks in, they realized the gaps were too structural to patch on the fly, and paused to look for a partner who understood both regulation and the DWH they were about to leave behind.
The Discovery: Finding IDS
IDS was introduced through the bank’s existing Data Platform & Engineering vendor shortlist, specifically for governance-first migration experience in regulated environments.
The Solution: The hero arrives
IDS ran a governance assessment against a four-stage maturity scale (Initial → Managed → Defined → Optimised), mapping every critical data domain against DORA, Basel IV, and GDPR requirements. MDM rules were designed in Collibra with Informatica MDM as the matching/merge engine, and Microsoft Purview was layered in for metadata lineage the auditors could trace end-to-end.
The Implementation: The battle
Remediation was sequenced by regulatory risk, not convenience — customer and counterparty data first, product hierarchies second. The hardest obstacle was organizational, not technical: getting three business units to agree on “who owns” a shared customer record. IDS facilitated a data ownership model that gave each business unit clear accountability without gridlocking decisions.
The Results: The happy ending
- Governance maturity: Initial → Defined
- Golden records established for 100% of top-tier corporate clients
- Zero governance-related findings in the subsequent regulatory readiness review
- Migration proceeded on the original timeline, with the data foundation no longer a critical-path risk
“We stopped guessing which record was true. That’s not a small thing when a regulator is asking.” — Head of Data Governance
Technologies used: Collibra · Informatica MDM · Microsoft Purview · custom governance frameworks