Open Data Lakehouse
Financial Services
Singapore
Standard Chartered Bank (SCB) is a London-based financial institution with a long history spanning Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Today, the bank operates across multiple markets in APAC and EMEA, supporting retail and corporate banking services in diverse regulatory environments.
As a Cloudera customer, Standard Chartered was recognized with a 2025 Cloudera Data Impact Award for operational leadership, reflecting its progress in strengthening data governance, improving efficiency, and enabling secure data sharing across the organization.
Strengthening SCB’s Data Strategy
Operating across APAC and EMEA, Standard Chartered must navigate a complex landscape of regional data sovereignty and regulatory requirements. This requires balancing local compliance obligations with the need for consistent data management across markets.
To support this, the bank focused on strengthening its data strategy by leveraging real-time data capabilities to meet regulatory requirements more effectively across its operating regions.
To achieve this, Standard Chartered required the ability to centralize data management and enable trusted, governed data delivery through a data lake platform, implemented in partnership with Cloudera.
Building the Datalake Platform
Standard Chartered realized that to meet the demands of a real-time economy, they needed to centralize management without sacrificing security. Partnering with Cloudera Professional Services, the bank architected a sophisticated Datalake platform powered by Apache NiFi and Cloudera Shared Data Experience (SDX), effectively implementing a data fabric. This multi-tenant architecture was designed with a single, mission-critical goal: to provide the business context to the data, which is the necessary foundation for governance and security. This is achieved through consistent policy enforcement, fine-grained access control, and absolute data lineage across 83,000 employees and dozens of regulatory jurisdictions.
The Result: Strengthening Governance and Compliance
The launch of the Datalake Platform has enabled Standard Chartered Bank to better manage data complexity across its operations.
By moving away from fragmented legacy systems and embracing a unified architecture, the bank has realized three transformative pillars of impact:
Accelerated Innovation: By utilizing standardized NiFi pipeline templates, Standard Chartered slashed development time by 40%. This isn’t just an efficiency gain; it’s a speed-to-market revolution that allows the bank to onboard new data sources and launch services in a fraction of the traditional time.
A "Governance-First" Competitive Edge: Rather than treating compliance as a final checkpoint, the bank embedded it into the data’s DNA. Thanks to the central role Cloudera SDX plays to consistently secure and govern data across the entire Datalake Platform, every byte of data is traceable and secure by design, turning grueling audit cycles into a streamlined, automated reality.
Frictionless Global Compliance: Navigating the "patchwork" of data sovereignty laws across APAC and EMEA is no longer a manual burden. The new platform, thanks to Cloudera SDX, acts as a digital diplomat, automatically enforcing fine-grained access controls and regional mandates to ensure the bank remains both global in reach and local in compliance.
By unifying flow orchestration and policy enforcement, Standard Chartered has improved controlled and governed data access across teams. They can now access the insights with unprecedented agility, ensuring that data is securely managed and governed in line with regulatory requirements across multiple jurisdictions.
Story developed in May 2026
