Tag Archives: Financial Services Data Architecture

Foundational Architecture Decisions in a Financial Services Data Platform

This article defines a comprehensive architectural doctrine for modern Financial Services data platforms, separating precursor decisions (what must be true for trust and scale) from foundational decisions (how the platform behaves under regulation, time, and organisational pressure). It explains why ingestion maximalism, streaming-first eventual consistency, transactional processing at the edge, domain-first design, and freshness as a business contract are non-negotiable in FS. Through detailed narrative and explicit anti-patterns, it shows how these decisions preserve optionality, enable regulatory defensibility, support diverse communities, and prevent the systemic failure modes that quietly undermine large-scale financial data platforms.

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Time, Consistency, and Freshness in a Financial Services Data Platform

This article explains why time, consistency, and freshness are first-class architectural concerns in modern Financial Services data platforms. It shows how truth in FS is inherently time-qualified, why event time must be distinguished from processing time, and why eventual consistency is a requirement rather than a compromise. By mapping these concepts directly to Bronze, Silver, Gold, and Platinum layers, the article demonstrates how platforms preserve historical truth, deliver reliable current-state views, and enforce freshness as an explicit business contract rather than an accidental outcome.

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Golden-Source Resolution, Multi-Source Precedence, and Regulatory Point-in-Time Reporting on SCD2 Bronze

Why Deterministic Precedence Is the Line Between “Data Platform” and “Regulatory Liability”. Modern UK Financial Services organisations ingest customer, account, and product data from 5–20 different systems of record, each holding overlapping and often conflicting truth. Delivering a reliable “Customer 360” or “Account 360” requires deterministic, audit-defensible precedence rules, survivorship logic, temporal correction workflows, and regulatory point-in-time (PIT) reconstructions: all operating on an SCD2 Bronze layer. This article explains how mature banks resolve multi-source conflicts, maintain lineage, rebalance history when higher-precedence data arrives late, and produce FCA/PRA-ready temporal truth. It describes the real patterns used in Tier-1 institutions, and the architectural techniques required to make them deterministic, scalable, and regulator-defensible.

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