Tag Archives: UK Financial Services

Series Wrap-Up: Reconstructing Time, Truth, and Trust in UK Financial Services Data Platforms

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This series explored how UK Financial Services data platforms can preserve temporal truth, reconstruct institutional belief, and withstand regulatory scrutiny at scale. Beginning with foundational concepts such as SCD2 and event modelling, it developed into a comprehensive architectural pattern centred on an audit-grade Bronze layer, non-SCD Silver consumption, and point-in-time defensibility. Along the way, it addressed operational reality, governance, cost, AI integration, and regulatory expectations. This final article brings the work together, offering a structured map of the series and a coherent lens for understanding how modern, regulated data platforms actually succeed. Taken together, this body of work describes what I refer to as a “land it early, manage it early” data platform architecture for regulated industries.

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The 2026 UK Financial Services Lakehouse Reference Architecture

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An opinionated but practical blueprint for regulated, temporal, multi-domain data platforms: focused on authority, belief, and point-in-time defensibility. This article lays out a reference architecture for UK FS in 2026: not as a rigid blueprint, but as a description of what “good” now looks like in banks, insurers, payments firms, wealth platforms, and capital markets organisations operating under FCA/PRA supervision.

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Cost Is a Control: FinOps and Cost Management in Regulated Financial Services Data Platforms

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This article positions cost management as a first-class architectural control rather than a post-hoc optimisation exercise. In regulated environments, cost decisions directly constrain temporal truth, optionality, velocity, and compliance. The article explains why FinOps must prioritise predictability, authority, and value alignment over minimisation, and how poorly designed cost pressure undermines regulatory defensibility. By linking cost to long-term value creation and regulatory outcomes, it provides a principled framework for sustaining compliant, scalable data platforms.

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Why UK Financial Services Data Platforms Must Preserve Temporal Truth for Regulatory Compliance

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A Regulatory Perspective (2025–2026). UK Financial Services regulation in 2025–2026 increasingly requires firms to demonstrate not just what is true today, but what was known at the time decisions were made. Across Consumer Duty, s166 reviews, AML/KYC, model risk, and operational resilience, regulators expect deterministic reconstruction of historical belief, supported by traceable evidence. This article explains where that requirement comes from, why traditional current-state platforms fail under scrutiny, and why preserving temporal truth inevitably drives architectures that capture change over time as a foundational control, not a technical preference.

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Event-Driven CDC to Correct SCD2 Bronze in 2025–2026

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Broken history often stays hidden until remediation or skilled-person reviews. Why? Event-driven Change Data Capture fundamentally changes how history behaves in a data platform. When Financial Services organisations move from batch ingestion to streaming CDC, long-standing SCD2 assumptions quietly break — often without immediate symptoms. Late, duplicated, partial, or out-of-order events can silently corrupt Bronze history and undermine regulatory confidence. This article sets out what “correct” SCD2 means in a streaming world, why most implementations fail, and how to design Bronze pipelines that remain temporally accurate, replayable, and defensible under PRA/FCA scrutiny in 2025–2026.

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

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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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