Banking Hyper-Personalisation Platform Powers Customer-Centric Digital Banking Transformation
About Company
A leading European banking institution serving millions of customers across retail, corporate, and wealth management segments. With a heritage spanning decades in financial services, this progressive bank recognised that modern customer expectations demanded a fundamental shift from product-centric to truly personalised, data-driven banking experiences.
Following increasing competitive pressure from digital-native fintech challengers and evolving customer behaviours, the organisation embarked on an ambitious initiative to build a next-generation analytics platform capable of delivering hyper-personalised financial products, services, and communications across all digital touchpoints.
Services and Technology
Challenge
The client faced critical barriers that hindered their ability to deliver personalised customer experiences and compete effectively in the rapidly evolving digital banking landscape.
Inadequate Customer Intelligence Infrastructure: Legacy analytics systems couldn't support a comprehensive Customer 360 data model with thousands of customer-oriented parameters needed for sophisticated personalization and behavioral analysis across millions of customer interactions
Disconnected Data-to-Action Pipeline: Complete absence of an integrated platform to transform real-time customer activity signals, clickstream data, and behavioural patterns into immediate marketing campaigns and sales actions, resulting in missed opportunities and generic customer communications
Inflexible Legacy Vendor Lock-In: Existing SAS, Adobe, and Oracle-based analytics solutions proved prohibitively expensive to scale while lacking the flexibility and agility required for modern real-time personalisation use cases and rapid experimentation.
Regulatory Complexity Without Agility: Stringent banking regulations and data protection requirements (GDPR, PSD2, AML) demanded robust compliance controls, but existing infrastructure couldn't deliver both regulatory compliance and the speed-to-market needed for competitive differentiation
Solution
Elitmind architected a comprehensive, regulation-compliant lakehouse platform leveraging Databricks' unified analytics capabilities to transform the client's customer intelligence and personalization capabilities.
Regulatory-Compliant Lakehouse Architecture: Designed and deployed a fully compliant lakehouse platform supporting both batch and real-time data processing workloads, enabling simultaneous historical analysis and millisecond-latency personalisationpersonalization decisions while maintaining full regulatory compliance with banking data protection standards
ISO 27001-Compliant Infrastructure as Code: Implemented enterprise-grade security and compliance automation using Infrastructure as Code (IaC) methodologies, ensuring consistent ISO 27001 compliance across all environments while enabling rapid, auditable infrastructure provisioning and change management
Unified Batch and Real-Time Processing Framework: Engineered a comprehensive data processing framework leveraging Databricks' Delta Lake architecture to seamlessly handle both high-volume batch processing for analytical workloads and streaming data pipelines for real-time customer behavior analysis and instant personalization triggers
Unity Catalog Data Governance: Integrated Databricks Unity Catalog as the centralized governance layer, providing fine-grained access controls, automated data lineage tracking, and comprehensive audit trails to ensure regulatory compliance while enabling self-service analytics across business units
Power BI Enterprise Integration: Connected Power BI seamlessly to the lakehouse platform, empowering business users with interactive dashboards and self-service analytics capabilities while maintaining strict data security and row-level access controls appropriate for sensitive financial data
Structured and Semi-Structured Data Processing: Built flexible data ingestion pipelines capable of processing traditional structured banking data alongside semi-structured sources, including clickstream events, mobile app interactions, JSON-formatted API responses, and real-time transaction streams
Clickstream Analytics Infrastructure: Deployed specialised clickstream processing capabilities, capturing and analysing millions of customer digital interactions across web, mobile, and digital banking channels to power hyper-personalisation algorithms and customer journey optimization
Results
The Banking Hyper-Personalisation Platform delivered a transformative business impact, positioning the client as an industry leader in customer-centric digital banking experiences.
Without unified customer intelligence and real-time personalisation capabilities, the organisation risked customer attrition to digital-first competitors, regulatory penalties from inadequate data governance, and millions in lost revenue from missed cross-selling opportunities and ineffective marketing campaigns.
Business Impact:
Customer 360 Intelligence Achieved: Successfully implemented a comprehensive Customer 360 data model encompassing thousands of behavioural, transactional, demographic, and interaction parameters across millions of customers—enabling unprecedented understanding of individual customer needs, preferences, and financial behaviours
Real-Time Personalization Capabilities: Transformed customer engagement from generic batch campaigns to real-time, contextually relevant interactions - analysing clickstream data and behavioural signals to trigger personalised product recommendations, tailored communications, and dynamic content within milliseconds of customer actions
Regulatory Compliance with Agility: Achieved full regulatory compliance with GDPR, PSD2, and banking data protection requirements through Unity Catalogue's inherent governance capabilities while simultaneously enabling 10x faster deployment of new analytics use cases compared to legacy systems
Dramatic Cost Reduction: Eliminated expensive SAS, Adobe, and Oracle licensing costs while delivering superior functionality—reducing total analytics platform costs by over 60% while simultaneously expanding capabilities and processing volumes
Infinite Scalability: Databricks' cloud-native architecture automatically scales compute resources based on demand, seamlessly handling peak transaction periods, batch processing windows, and real-time streaming workloads without performance degradation or manual intervention
Self-Service Analytics Empowerment: Power BI integration combined with Unity Catalog's governed data access democratized customer insights across marketing, product, risk, and executive teams—reducing time-to-insight from weeks to hours while maintaining enterprise security standards
Enhanced Marketing Effectiveness: Real-time behavioural analytics and hyper-personalisation capabilities increased marketing campaign conversion rates by over 40% and improved customer engagement metrics across all digital channels through contextually relevant, timely interactions
Tailored for success
"Building a hyper-personalisation platform for a regulated banking environment required balancing innovation with stringent compliance requirements. Our team delivered a fully ISO 27001-compliant lakehouse architecture leveraging Databricks' unified data analytics platform, Delta Lake for reliable data processing, and Unity Catalog for comprehensive governance. The infrastructure-as-code approach ensures consistency and auditability across all environments. This platform processes both structured banking data and semi-structured clickstream events in real-time, enabling the client to transform customer signals into immediate personalised actions while maintaining complete regulatory compliance. The architecture is designed for unlimited scalability, supporting the client's ambition to become the most customer-centric bank in their market."
Maciej Chojnacki, Head of Delivery & Technology, Elitmind
Our Approach
Unified analytics platform combining the best of data warehouses and data lakes to support all analytics and AI workloads on a single, open architecture.
ACID-compliant storage layer providing reliable data processing with transactional guarantees, schema enforcement, and time travel capabilities for both batch and streaming data.
Centralized governance solution delivering fine-grained access control, automated data lineage, and comprehensive audit trails across all data assets to ensure regulatory compliance.
Comprehensive information security management system ensuring all data processing, storage, and access controls meet international standards for protecting sensitive financial information.
Automated infrastructure provisioning and management approach ensuring consistent, repeatable, and auditable deployments across all environments while reducing manual errors.
Seamless connection between the lakehouse platform and Microsoft Power BI enabling business users to create interactive dashboards and self-service analytics with enterprise-grade security.