Building a Data Mesh: Fifth Third Bank's Data Strategy Journey

CDO Magazine and ComSpark hosted the CDO Midwest Summit 2022, gathering data and technology industry leaders to address challenges and exchange profound insights and relevant problem-solving experiences. Fifth Third Bank's Assistant Vice President/Product Owner of Data Strategy, Kayleigh Lavorini, talks about “Building a Data Mesh: Fifth Third Bank's Data Strategy Journey.”Taylor Gorning, AHEAD Managing Director, moderated the session.

In her introduction, Lavorini describes Fifth Third Bank as a leader that puts customers at the center. She emphasizes that financial institutions' success relies fundamentally on the evolution of a data culture. Because the bank's supply chain is digital and data-driven, Lavorini believes creating and evolving a culture based on these factors is imperative.

She asserts that banks should hire data engineers familiar with data and its processes, noting that the right mechanisms and platforms are required for modern data culture to develop.

The process of finding and validating data takes time, says Lavorini. She mentions teams working on process improvements to get to the root cause analysis because the rapidly changing technology impacts data demand.

Next, Lavorini discusses the following aspects of Fifth Third Bank’s data journey:

• It started with a central data warehouse that accelerated business analytics and shielded downstream users from complex mainframes and file-based systems.

• Eventually, the data grew, and several source systems entered the ecosystem and expanded data that accelerated consumer demand changes.

• The bank then introduced the data lake concept to address data latency issues.

• After the bank obtained a single storage location for its data, its primary concern was the work skills needed in an unstructured environment.

• After that, data mesh entered the picture to solve the supply and demand problem.

She then discusses two key data economics issues the organization hopes to resolve. The first is embedded processes to provide guardrails to users after federating a job, and the second is cultural evolution. “Cultural evolution in itself is going to be a big hurdle to overcome, and that is the people's problem,” Lavorini says. “That is why data mesh and our data strategy journey is a little more than technology. It is a lot about people.”

Continuing, she elaborates on the following four guiding principles of data strategy:

1. Embedded data management. The key is to embed data management into the data pipeline and production process. It is about transparency in the data supply chain, from data sources to ingestion to data transformation. The bank then aggregates the metadata created through automation to provide easy-to-find information.

2. Standard design patterns and templates. Organizations must provide patterns and frameworks to enable the application of human-centric design to interact with data. They must consider:

• • Putting “reuse” at the design core to reduce overproduction and over-replication of data.
  • Getting data as close to the source as possible.
  • Being as close to real-time as possible.
  • Building something designed to integrate across domains.

1. Integrated platforms and data services. This includes creating custom software solutions to help lower the entry barrier and commoditize ingestion with internally built solutions while considering organizational security. 
2. Voice of the consumer: Building a modern data culture at Fifth Third is about changing people’s minds with data and finding ways to overcome the barriers associated with it. Data exchange as a platform aims to bring producers and data product owners closer to their consumers.

Lavorini describes data exchange as an online marketplace for data producers to register data and for consumers to validate access to all the data. She explains that this solves the discovery issue and fosters a self-service environment with active metadata.

“The meat and potatoes of it is our ability to serve up a data products card that gives them the information they are asking for,” asserts Lavorini. The flexible network enables users to access information from wherever the data product lives and generates valuable feedback, she adds.

“Changing the mindset of product and shifting data ownership into full value streams is a great driver for Fifth Third Bank,” Lavorini notes at the session’s close.

Watch other CDO Midwest Summit 2022 sessions HERE