Financial institutions face mounting pressure to balance regulatory compliance, risk management, and customer growth while legacy data warehouses slow down innovation and drive up costs.
Customers want instant, personalized service. Regulators want deeper transparency. Inside the bank, teams are juggling point solutions, spreadsheets, and overnight reports that arrive just in time to be out of date. Every new request—from a new risk scenario to a new product idea—turns into a mini-transformation project.
OpenText has mapped this tension into a seven-step journey from traditional to hyper-intelligent financial service institution (FSI): a state where decisions are faster, evidence-driven, and easier to explain and defend.
This blog looks at three big shifts behind that journey and why your enterprise data warehouse is the backbone that makes all three possible.
Shift 1: Data-driven decision-making for banks and financial institutions
Even in data-rich banks, a surprising amount of strategy still rests on habit and seniority. Dashboards exist, but different teams look at different versions of the truth. When numbers clash, people default to instinct.
The firms that move toward “hyper-intelligent” decision-making don’t start with tools. They start with clarity:
- A clear view of how data, analytics, and AI help hit growth and risk targets
- Leaders who bring hard numbers into every key decision
- Teams that can read, question, and use data in everyday work
A practical first step is surprisingly simple: agree on a small, non-negotiable set of metrics for customer, risk, and profitability—and publish them from a single source. Those metrics appear in board packs, on trading floor walls, and in branch performance reviews. Over time, “What do the numbers say?” becomes the default starting point.
That only works if the data warehouse can deliver one version of those numbers consistently:
- Same definitions across risk, finance, and product
- Line-of-sight from report back to source
- Performance strong enough to refresh when markets move
Without that foundation, the push toward “data-driven” decisions stalls in arguments over whose spreadsheet is right.
Shift 2: Modernizing the enterprise data warehouse for real-time risk and compliance
Volatility is no longer an episode; it’s the backdrop. Interest-rate swings, new capital rules, cyber incidents, and changing climate risk models: all of them pile onto already complex risk and finance processes.
Traditional setups treat each shock as a special project. New feeds are wired in, new reports are built, and new manual checks appear. The result is slow change and high cost.
A more resilient approach focuses on building the ability to anticipate and adapt:
- Continuously tracking emerging industry challenges, not just once a year
- Making advanced analytics and AI part of standard workflows, not side projects
- Designing processes for an insight-driven world, where models, not just policies, influence big decisions
On the ground, that shows up as:
- Moving key risk and liquidity metrics from batch to near real-time
- Running more frequent stress tests and scenario analyses without month-long build-ups
- Feeding signals from contact centers, mobile apps, and transaction streams back into models and monitoring
Again, the enterprise data warehouse is central. It must handle:
- Fast ingestion of new feeds without months of re-engineering
- Mixed workloads (regulatory reporting, ad-hoc analysis, AI training) without grinding to a halt
- Strong governance so new signals don’t compromise data quality or controls
When the warehouse can flex like this, new regulatory or market shocks become new queries on an existing foundation, not full-scale rebuilds.
Shift 3: Building an AI-ready enterprise data warehouse backbone
FSI has no shortage of technology. Core banking platforms, insurance systems, risk engines, martech, CRM, trading platforms—the list keeps growing. Global digital spend continues to rise, but without the proper foundation, adding more tools just adds more noise.
When you look at AI in financial services, the same pattern shows up: success comes down to three things—speed, scale, and skills. AI only creates value if you can move quickly, handle enterprise-scale volumes, and equip teams with the skills and interfaces they need to use it safely and responsibly.
Two moves matter most here:
- Building up AI skills across the organization so teams can work with models, not just hand off requirements to a specialist group
- Choosing platforms that can support that future: systems built for complex data, strong security, and AI-driven workloads—not just yesterday’s reporting needs
A modern enterprise data warehouse is one of those platforms. To support AI at real FSI scale, it needs to:
- Bring together critical data from risk, finance, customer, and fraud domains with clear lineage
- Run advanced analytics and in-database machine learning close to the data, so you’re not exporting sensitive records to experimental side systems
- Deliver the performance and concurrency to support both regulatory workloads and AI initiatives
- Operate across hybrid and multi-cloud environments, respecting strict security and residency requirements
With that backbone in place, adding new AI use cases—fraud detection, smarter credit decisions, personalized offers—becomes faster and less risky. You’re not starting from scratch each time; you’re reusing an AI-ready foundation built on trusted data.
Turning the 7-step framework into your roadmap
AI won’t fix a fragmented data environment on its own. The institutions that pull ahead will be the ones that line up how they decide, how they operate, and where their data lives—and do it on a foundation built for AI from day one.
Our new whitepaper, “From traditional to hyper-intelligent: The 7-step journey for FSI firms,” developed in collaboration with Database Trends and Applications (DBTA), goes deeper on those moves: the people change, the operating model shifts, and the technology choices that turn pressure into an advantage.
If you’re feeling the squeeze of tighter regulations, higher growth targets, and rising costs from legacy warehouses, your enterprise data warehouse is a natural place to start.
Explore how a modern enterprise data warehouse supports that journey in FSI
