Degroof Petercam is a pure-play private bank and investment house with a history dating back to 1871. It is an independent group owned by family shareholders with a long-term commitment. Clients in over 22 countries benefit from a unique combination of services in private banking, institutional asset management, investment banking (corporate finance and global markets), and asset services.
Pierre Everard is a senior developer and technical leader of the IT Data Management team at Degroof Petercam, a team of 28 people, seven of whom work with VaultSpeed daily. The team helps the bank’s various business departments in their day-to-day work by providing quality data. Analytics and business intelligence (BI) are used to support legal and regulatory reporting, as well as to report directly to clients and improve their experience with the bank.
Degroof Petercam accelerates quality data delivery with VaultSpeed
Challenge
For Pierre Everard, the essential criteria for a data warehouse were agility and versatility. As their existing data warehouse was becoming obsolete, the team started searching for a solution that would solve problems with parallel loading and allow convenient data historization.
Degroof Petercam needed a data warehouse that could include data from multiple, multi-country sources and was compatible with a modern technology stack. After extensive research, the IT Data Management team concluded that Data Vault 2.0 modeling and architecture methodology would be the best solution for their needs.
Why VaultSpeed?
Initially, Pierre and his team were not very familiar with Data Vault 2.0 — it became clear to them that without expertise in this domain, building a Data Vault would be a painstaking and difficult task. That’s where VaultSpeed’s expertise and easy automation tool came into play.
“The Scalefree Data Vault 2.0 training and guidance from the VaultSpeed support team covered 98% of what we needed to know about Data Vault,” says Pierre. “At first, there was a learning curve because we hadn’t much knowledge in the beginning. But it didn’t take long to become confident and autonomous, because the tool is really easy to use.”
As an established company, Degroof Petercam already had a scheduler and an ETL tool in place. Keeping existing solutions and not having to go through a complete technology overhaul was an important requirement for them. VaultSpeed met this requirement because it supports a wide range of technologies, including the ones that Degroof Petercam uses — Oracle and Talend.
Pierre notes that VaultSpeed’s client-oriented approach is not limited to the tool’s functionality. “The tool is being supported by a dedicated team of professionals with deep knowledge, required flexibility and that are keen to help and eager to evolve and bring new improvement to the tool.”
Solution
VaultSpeed changed Degroof Petercam’s way of working and helped save time in every project it was applied to. “VaultSpeed accelerated every data warehouse development sprint we started,” Pierre continues, “by speeding up source discovery, and thanks to ready-to-use Data Vault 2.0 structures, and automatic code generation and deployment into our data pipelines in Talend.”
VaultSpeed’s versioning system enables the bank to work with more sources, different developers, and different projects simultaneously. The tool made Data Vault development and data migration easy by keeping targets and sources in sync and adapting to changes quickly. “If you write hundreds of lines of code, you will definitely have errors. If you are inconsistent with the versioning tools, that will cause problems too. With VaultSpeed, we don’t have to worry about that”, Pierre adds.
A team consisting of VaultSpeed CSM’s and DWH experts from our local service partner Datasense delivered expertise and knowledge transfer and helped Degroof Petercam understand the main concepts of Data Vault 2.0 and how the VaultSpeed tool works. The tool spared Degroof Petercam hours of manual work, fixing errors, and the risk of technical debt. The collaboration went smoothly also because the two companies share core values: at VaultSpeed, just as at Bank Degroof Petercam, we value a client-centered approach and always aim to provide an innovative solution.
Results
27
Source systems integrated2577
Objects in the Data Vault8 weeks
From first source ingestion to first production-ready release