The Challenge
This Fortune 500 financial services firm managed $200B+ in assets across investment management, retail banking, and insurance divisions. Each division maintained separate data warehouses — SQL Server, Oracle, and Teradata — with no unified view of client relationships or risk exposure. Report creation required manual data extraction and Excel reconciliation, taking analysts 3-5 days per report. The firm faced increasing regulatory pressure for faster, more accurate risk reporting. Over 400 Power BI reports existed across the organization with no governance, certification, or version control.
Our Solution
Architected a Microsoft Fabric OneLake data lakehouse that consolidated data from SQL Server, Oracle, and Teradata into a unified Delta Lake format. Implemented medallion architecture (bronze/silver/gold) for progressive data refinement.
Built enterprise semantic models in Power BI that serve as the single source of truth for client, risk, and financial metrics. Composite models allow real-time trading data alongside historical warehouse data.
Implemented comprehensive governance framework: workspace hierarchy (Dev/Test/Prod), deployment pipelines, dataset certification process, and Power BI catalog for report discovery. Reduced ungoverned reports from 400+ to 85 certified reports.
Configured SOC 2 compliance controls including sensitivity labels for PII/financial data, conditional access policies, DLP rules preventing data export to personal devices, and continuous audit logging with 90-day retention.
Deployed self-service analytics program enabling analysts to build reports from certified semantic models while maintaining governance guardrails through dataset endorsement and row-level security.
Results
Reports that took 3-5 days now take hours with pre-built semantic models and self-service tools.
Full SOC 2 Type II compliance with sensitivity labels, DLP, conditional access, and audit logging.
Analysts create their own reports from certified semantic models, reducing BI team backlog.
Ungoverned report sprawl reduced from 400+ to 85 certified, trusted reports.
Eliminated legacy Teradata and Oracle licensing costs by migrating to Fabric consumption model.
Investment management, retail banking, and insurance share a single analytical platform.
Implementation Methodology
Phase 1 (Weeks 1-4): Assessment and architecture. Inventoried 400+ reports, mapped data sources, designed target OneLake architecture, and defined governance framework.
Phase 2 (Weeks 5-8): Data platform migration. Built Fabric data pipelines for SQL Server, Oracle, and Teradata. Implemented medallion architecture with data quality validation.
Phase 3 (Weeks 9-14): Semantic model development. Created enterprise semantic models for client 360, risk analytics, and financial reporting domains.
Phase 4 (Weeks 15-18): Governance and security. Deployed workspace hierarchy, deployment pipelines, certification process, SOC 2 controls, and self-service guidelines.
Phase 5 (Weeks 19-20): Rollout and training. Division-by-division deployment with analyst training and champion network establishment.