Santander Builds Self-Service Data Marketplace to Innovate Digital Banking

Santander Brasil’s journey with Informatica began in 2019. Following a proof of concept in 2020 and a pilot project the following year, the bank kickstarted its company-wide data transformation and began scaling up the platform in 2022. It had three goals for the transformation. The first was to improve data access for its governance team, which would promote greater autonomy and collaboration among its employees. The team previously had no platform to manage the operational environment, nor could they automate data processes at the scale needed to work quickly and effectively.

Santander Bank wanted to set up a self-service data marketplace for enterprise data consumption across its organization. This “data marketplace” was the most important milestone of Santander’s transformation, according to Roberto, as it would enable the bank to improve data categorization, better manage the enormous volume of information it collects, and make it easier to navigate for employees, all on a single platform.

“A marketplace is more than a tool. It centralizes all the crucial details about our data, including our policies, classification methods, and quality,” says Barros da Costa. “Few companies, and even fewer banks, are integrating their data management and access, but we felt it was crucial for the success of our business and the people we serve.”

The business is also migrating its data environment to Microsoft Azure Cloud and is already curating its data marketplace on the platform. Informatica prepared Santander for the migration with regard to data governance and data management, and the company is now looking forward to further integrations between Informatica Data Marketplace and Azure as its transformation continues. “The fact that Informatica has been so deeply integrated with Microsoft for years certainly stood out when we were evaluating solutions,” says Roberto.

Santander also made enterprise data more transparent throughout its lifecycle, which helps employees to track its lineage and help ensure privacy for the bank’s customers.

Santander centralized its enterprise data on Informatica Data Marketplace in what is now the biggest platform of its kind in Latin America. Employees across the business now feel secure knowing the data they are using to inform their decisions and serve customers is relevant, accurate, and of the highest quality.

“We all know data is the key to making intelligent business decisions, but few can fully trust the provenance and quality of data informing their strategies. The Informatica Data Marketplace gives every user in our organization that confidence,” says Data Governance Specialist, Diogo Barros.

The team set out to change the way Santander treats data, sharing the idea of “data as a product” across the enterprise, empowering governance teams with the autonomy to access the information they need and set their own priorities when using that data, while also keeping data governance top of mind. With a unified view of Santander’s data in a single location, teams across the business can enjoy a self-service approach to data access, complete with reports that offer the information they need to make smarter business decisions.

One of the first use cases for this approach was an attempt to reduce churn for Santander’s personal credit solutions. Using Informatica, the bank was able to create complete customer profiles, down to the most granular of details, and identify and forecast behavioral patterns among its customers and prospects.

“The Informatica data marketplace allowed us to drive a cultural change and get people to uncover new value in our data,” says Barros. “The ability to predict, address, and reduce churn more effectively was the first of many milestones to come.

The marketplace approach to data management also improved the user experience for Santander’s data governance team. Rather than just viewing data in large and complex tables, employees can browse through data categories with the same ease of an Amazon.com like experience. The result is that teams can find the data they need faster, with the knowledge that it is of the highest quality.

“Informatica Data Governance is so simple to navigate, it’s like a digital supermarket for our data,” adds Roberto. “Users can search for data by category, like they would search for products in the grocery aisle, and easily narrow their search using a range of filters. The result is a comprehensive 360-degree view of the information they need, as well as all the context that gives that data meaning.”

Santander is now strengthening the self-service capabilities of its data marketplace with additional reviews and search filters. “From the terms and conditions of data use to timelines for when individual data points will expire, our business users need a full picture of the information they are accessing to be accountable,” says Barros. “Informatica is a key piece of that puzzle.”