Macquarie to build new Hadoop cluster

Macquarie’s corporate and asset finance group will embark on an information management program involving the creation of a new Hadoop cluster.

The bank is in the process of building a small team to run technical aspects of the project that will sit within an existing data management function in corporate and asset finance (CAF).

CAF manages $38.1 billion in funded assets. Those assets include aviation, motor vehicle, industrial, energy, rail, mining, and corporate real estate.

According to recruitment advertisements, “CAF has a number of application platforms to support [its] varied lending and leasing activities”.

“[We are] embarking upon an information management program to enable high quality data analytics and insights to meet both regulatory [and] bank needs, as well as to offer value-add insights to our clients,” Macquarie said.

The new hires – which include a group information architect, Hadoop senior data engineer, and a data modeller – will define the target information architecture and build out the “next-generation data management platform”.

The bank indicated its decision to use Hadoop was driven by a desire to “change towards a data-centric technology platform” that offered “the ability to aggregate and manage data from a variety of sources” across CAF.

It noted the possibility of running “big data machine learning” across the cluster.

The bank did not reveal details of the existing information architecture within CAF.

A Macquarie spokesperson declined to comment.