Joanne Hannaford, global co-head of enterprise platforms at Goldman Sachs and one of the most senior female software engineers in the banking industry, speaks to Joy Macknight about the investment bank’s transformation projects.

Joanne Hannaford portrait

The finance industry faces specific challenges around data aggregation and using information across the whole enterprise. Most institutions have multiple business lines, each with disparate information and variations on data definitions. “One of the challenges in financial services is bringing that information together to meet the increasing demands of clients,” says Joanne Hannaford, global co-head of enterprise platforms at Goldman Sachs.

The traditional way the banking industry stores data is “brittle”, she says, pointing to Goldman Sachs’ historical domain of 75,000 relational databases.

One way to solve the problem is to take the data out of the databases, clean it up and try to create common identifiers. “But that is just impossible,” says Ms Hannaford, “so we decided to provide a roadmap [on] how to query information, which allows the bank to think differently about data.”

Big data infrastructure

By creating a new interface with applications, such as its Marquee platform, Goldman Sachs has provided a new way for its clients to connect digitally with its people, capital and ideas. Marquee is an open-architecture, web-based platform that gives Goldman Sachs’ clients access to the same risk management and analytical tools that are used internally at the firm. It required the bank to aggregate its information and use enterprise solutions, according to Ms Hannaford.

Instead of having a fluid, highly distributed architecture – effectively transferring data ingredients needed for each calculation around the organisation – the bank decided to “take the compute to the data”, according to Ms Hannaford. It created its own data lake, a large storage repository and processing engine. The data is stored and then made accessible in an easy manner to those entitled to it. “Being able to quickly provide access to disparate data sets is a business differentiator,” says Ms Hannaford.

The data lake went live in September 2015, and it has already generated a lot of enthusiasm internally. Ms Hannaford was pleased to overhear bankers talking about how they were looking forward to certain data sets being loaded into the data lake, and discussing the applications they could then develop in Marquee for their clients to use. She adds: “It is about enterprise ownership of our digital solutions”.

In the cloud

Long associated with innovation, Goldman Sachs openly embraced cloud technology, implementing its first private cloud 11 years ago, eliminating the need for office PCs. It is now using public cloud services from multiple vendors and works closely with them to create seamless interfaces. For example, the bank was able to use a cloud provider to 'spin up' an environment for 2000 graduate training programmes in 2015

Ms Hannaford, who started programming when she was 11 years old, dismisses the argument that a public cloud is not as secure as an on-premise mainframe environment. “Cloud is the worst name possible – it gives the impression that it is nebulous or porous, but in fact it is very secure. It should really be called a vault,” she says.

“We don’t see any limits to what cloud technology could be used for. Why would we have Goldman Sachs data centres when we could have equally secure facilities with capacity that we can lease and upgrade with a flick of a switch?”

Tech trends

Ms Hannaford believes that the concept of identity is more interesting than Bitcoin when talking about the future potential of blockchain. “One of the big benefits of blockchain is that it creates a very clear sense of identity through the aggregation of a series of transactions and forms a digital signature,” she says.

She highlights the pressures created by the know-your-customer (KYC) standards. “Today, every bank is going through the same rigorous KYC process. A blockchain type solution could help to solve this issue because it is an authorative record of groups participating in same transaction and sharing information.”

Ms Hannaford would like to see more open sourcing in financial services. Although the industry has a history of working together in an open way, technology is not shared as much as it could be. “It sounds so obvious – being able to share the cost of regulation, implementation and best practice,” she says. 

In October 2015, Goldman Sachs became a full member of open-source community Eclipse Foundation. In the same year, the bank also spun out Symphony, a communications system it created internally, and built a consortium of banks and buy-side firms to help drive initiative forward. The bank is partnering with the International Swaps and Derivatives Association to discuss with the industry how to leverage open standards to meet regulations so that the whole industry benefits.

“This also ties into the difficulty tech start-ups face when the barrier to entry is so high around regulatory requirements. One way to help that is through open source, which we hope, with our help, will become more mainstream,” she says.

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