💼 Scenario
FinServ is a financial services company with $200 billion in assets under management, operating across wealth management, asset management, and insurance divisions. The company's data architecture has evolved over 25 years into a complex landscape of 350 applications, 120 databases, and 45 point-to-point integrations between critical systems. The architecture has become brittle: a single system change triggered cascading failures across seven downstream systems last quarter.
The Chief Architect has been asked to design a target state data architecture that supports the company's digital transformation strategy, including real-time portfolio analytics, AI-driven investment recommendations, and a unified client portal. Current challenges include: no single source of truth for client information (each division maintains its own), batch-only data movement with 24-48 hour latency, inability to support real-time decision-making, and an estimated $15 million annual spend on integration maintenance.
Regulatory requirements mandate complete data lineage for all investment decisions, and the architecture must support the company's plan to expand into three new Asian markets within two years.