ANZ details Google Cloud-based risk reporting system

ANZ Banking Group has now stood up a “unified data platform and architecture” for risk and regulatory reporting, a project it has previously spoken about pursuing over several years.

In a blog post last week, ANZ’s risk strategy and transformation head of reporting and modelling Artur Kaluza wrote that the bank’s risk department “plans to migrate and condense 100 distinct on-premise systems to 55 cloud-based systems, with one single Google Cloud-deployed risk data hub at the centre.”

The data will be used to “swiftly glean insights, enhance credit decisioning, credit risk comprehension, and … to reduce financial crime,” he wrote.

Those insights could be “foundational to new product development,” Kaluza added.

“Using Google Cloud, ANZ has created a single unified data platform and architecture that addresses the key needs of risk and regulatory reporting.

“Data is loaded into a single storage layer with huge capacity, and is processed by large-scale ephemeral compute resources.”

BigQuery is still the underlying technology platform, as had been flagged earlier, however it is also supported by “open source tools [that] catalogue the source’s data, and provide a clear view of a report’s lineage.”

On that note, he added that ANZ had “adopted the open source dbt [data build tool] framework to aid transformation and lineage tracking of data once it’s been ingested into the data platform.

Kaluza said that “extended [data] transformation sequences” in traditional reporting architectures otherwise made data lineage more difficult to establish and maintain.