Case Study
Financial Services Data Catalogue
- Client Tier-one European bank with global operations
- Scope Enterprise data catalogue, exchange and quality management platform
- Scale Thousands of datasets, hundreds of teams across multiple continents
- Team Grew from 5 engineers to over 100 in a global agile delivery
The client — a major, systemically important European bank — asked HMx Labs to design and deliver an enterprise-grade platform to catalogue, exchange and govern data across thousands of datasets. With hundreds of applications and teams spread around the globe, the bank needed a standardised way to find, share and control critical data while meeting stringent regulatory requirements.
The Ask
The bank wanted a platform that would:
- Discover data — give every team the ability to search for and understand available datasets, including formats, types and scheduling
- Exchange data seamlessly — support multiple delivery mechanisms (HTTP, message queues, gRPC, HDFS and more) for both real-time and batch use-cases
- Assure data quality — report on timeliness and quality against publisher-defined SLAs and provide alerts when data fell outside tolerance
- Enforce control gates — implement residency and access controls to meet geographic and regulatory constraints, ensuring sensitive data never left approved regions
- Streamline onboarding — make it easy for new data publishers and consumers to join the platform at scale
The Challenge
Building a single platform to serve an entire global bank is rarely straightforward. The client faced a set of interlocking challenges that demanded careful architecture, disciplined delivery and deep domain knowledge.
- Complex distributed architecture — coordinating interfaces, schemas and messaging patterns across hundreds of services
- Big-data store — indexing heterogeneous metadata at scale to meet strict latency expectations
- Regulatory compliance — regional data-residency and sensitivity rules adding complexity to access control and routing logic
- Global collaboration — coordinating over 100 engineers across three continents with clear communication and shared ownership
Our Approach
HMx Labs provided architectural leadership from inception through to deployment.
Core Architecture & Design
We designed a microservices-based system deployed on Kubernetes, leveraging a NoSQL big-data store to handle large volumes and diverse data formats. An event bus implementing a CQRS pattern enabled decoupled services for quality reporting and notifications.
Scaling the Team
As requirements expanded, we grew the engineering team from an initial five engineers to over 100 across three continents. Code ownership was aligned with global teams to match the distributed architecture and support continuous integration.
Modern Development Practices
Adoption of agile, extreme programming and infrastructure as code improved delivery cadence and reliability. Continuous integration and automated deployment pipelines ensured each microservice could be delivered independently.
Upskilling & Knowledge Sharing
We worked closely with feature teams to raise the technical bar, running regular knowledge-sharing sessions, producing video tutorials, and introducing a component guardianship model to maintain quality. Production support rotas ensured operational knowledge was evenly spread.
Business Outcomes
By the time the platform went live, it delivered tangible value across the bank:
- Faster time to insight — teams could search, discover and integrate datasets in minutes rather than days, accelerating development and decision-making
- Improved quality and trust — automated quality checks and SLA reporting increased confidence in data, reducing downstream errors and rework
- Reduced onboarding overhead — standardised processes and tooling minimised onboarding time, enabling more than 50% of scoped datasets to be published in the first six months compared to legacy processes
- Enhanced compliance — fine-grained access controls and residency rules ensured sensitive data stayed within approved boundaries, simplifying audits and regulatory reporting
- Scalability & resilience — microservices architecture and containerised deployment allowed the bank to expand capacity on demand while maintaining high availability
The data catalogue and exchange platform now serves as a foundation for further innovation; enabling AI/ML initiatives, advanced analytics and improved customer experiences.
Why a Data Catalogue
Without a catalogue, data in a large enterprise is invisible — locked in silos, inconsistently described, and impossible to govern. A well-designed catalogue makes data a first-class asset.
- Find the right dataset quickly, without hunting across teams and systems
- Understand data before consuming it — formats, ownership, schedules, quality
- Enforce who can access what and from where, automatically
- Monitor SLAs and quality in real time, with automated alerting
- Give auditors and regulators a clear, defensible record of data movement
Why HMx Labs
Delivering a platform at this scale requires more than good engineering. It demands the ability to align architecture, operations, compliance, and a large distributed team around a shared vision.
HMx Labs combines deep expertise in enterprise data architecture, distributed systems, and regulated environments with hands-on delivery leadership. We bring the architectural thinking to design it right, the engineering practice to build it reliably, and the experience to grow and manage a global team delivering it.
- Design scalable data platform architecture from the ground up
- Build and lead large, distributed agile engineering teams
- Embed quality, governance and compliance from day one
- Deliver without vendor lock-in using open standards and cloud-native tooling
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