AFTAs 2024: Best data management initiative—Bank of America

Initiative overview

Bank of America’s DataConnect platform provides a range of data management capabilities designed to help users process and manage data throughout their business lifecycle. This environment provides an end-to-end solution from data sourcing on the one hand to reporting and analytics on the other. It offers a framework that integrates data ingestion and controls, business data transformations and workflow management, scheduling, orchestration and calculations.

The DataConnect platform consists of seven principal capabilities:

• Data ingestion
• Flow designer
• Rules engine
• Scheduling
• Execution dashboard
• Parameter management
• Data quality analytics and reporting

The problem it solves  

Understanding and managing Bank of America’s data presents the firm with a number of key challenges due to its size and scale. These challenges include:

• Lack of data processing transparency and lineage: Critical business data processing is invariably opaque to the businesses that rely on them. Code containing the data-processing logic is often compiled, executed through scripts and then stored in databases without the ability for end-users to easily interpret the logic.
• Difficulty integrating new data: Business data processing flows draw on data from numerous sources across the business, including databases, flat files, APIs or other network locations. Access to these data sources is neither uniform nor standardized.
• Data quality controls: These exist either outside normal processing flows or are scattered throughout the process within code files. It is therefore unclear whether all conditions for proper processing have been met.
• Data volume processing: Large volumes of data not only take significant time to process but consume network bandwidth and computing resources. Large data volumes also tax the overall processing environment, which makes monitoring difficult.

The technology  

DataConnect addresses the need to provide a real-time unified solution for the bank’s extensive internal data sources. It incorporates a user interface that aligns processes, transforms and filters data with minimal coding requirements and uses simple UI components available via drag-and-drop functionality. DataConnect is a web-based, low-code visual data management platform with rich UI features enabling non-tech users to build and automate their data-driven business processes. It also satisfies users’ everyday data needs by connecting with various upstream systems. 

The platform makes end-users and developers more efficient as it enables them to focus on what each does best. This helps to shorten release cycles and minimizes development costs. DataConnect has end-to-end traceability throughout its data processing within inline data controls, resulting in a scalable and customizable orchestration engine able to keep pace with demands for new data processing flows, while its structure enables reusability of controlled business data. Its calculation and aggregation capabilities use a workflow designer and rules engine, coupled with a real-time execution dashboard reporting and analytics capability to support data processes. It provides a solution that processes billions of rows of data at speed, automating business processes and supporting analytical insights.

Future plans

Bank of America plans to expand the use of DataConnect across additional chief financial office (CFO), chief administration office, and risk teams. Below are potential initiatives the firm is looking to develop:

• Deeper capital and liquidity risk monitoring
• Corporate planning, enterprise stress-testing and recovery and resolution planning
• Technology and operations expense monitoring and management
• Cost savings and efficiency gains by retiring legacy treasury and CFO analytics applications
• Continued integration of AI processing features
• Additional cost efficiencies by replacing third-party and other in-house-built tools across the bank’s other data platforms
• Continued development of GUI flexibility to further simplify end-user tools

Why they won

If there is one project category across the financial services industry that deserves the “iceberg” epithet, it is data management. These projects might appear simple at the outset, but they often deliver many unforeseen challenges just below the waterline when the development work kicks off in earnest. The industry is littered with examples of flawed, overspent or overrun data management projects that for whatever reason have failed to deliver on their promise. 

Bank of America’s impressive Enterprise DataConnect project is an example of what is possible when data management is done is right. There is little doubt that the firm’s architects and engineers would have encountered their fair share of challenges during the development and implementation of the DataConnect platform, but the benefits accruing to the business on the back of its creation are significant. 

When it comes to data management projects, keeping things as simple as possible is the way to go, and it is here where DataConnect excels. Its interface featuring drag-and-drop functionality aligns processes and transforms and filters data with minimal coding requirements, allowing non-tech users to build and automate their various data-driven business processes, while simultaneously satisfying their various data needs by connecting with upstream systems.

Data projects tend not to be “one and done” propositions—data, it seems, is never done. As one would expect, Bank of America is looking to build on its early gains by extending the initiative to other parts of the business, optimizing a range of business processes heavily contingent on clean, efficient and transparent data.