About the Bank
This global bank provides personal and corporate banking services to millions of customers worldwide. Its broker-dealer (BD) business line offers execution services to institutional clients, requiring routine handling of sensitive and confidential data from multiple sources.
With tens of billions in annual revenue and dozens of high profile clients, implementing comprehensive data privacy and security measures is paramount in delivering the top-notch service customers have come to expect.
Challenge
The bank’s BD is legally responsible for ensuring controls are in place to manage conflicts of interest and prevent traders from misusing confidential client information for personal or
corporate gain. Regulators require that information barriers exist between different trading desks or business units, but many institutional clients demand additional safeguards to ensure orders and trades remain confidential. BDs must ensure sufficient controls are in place to comply with these contractual provisions.
However, since the bank relied on a combination of human and machine execution channels, and each execution varied based on market conditions, client requirements, and cost, it was difficult for BDs to apply controls that would reliably and adequately protect sensitive data, particularly at scale.
The bank’s electronic trading teams used a common data science platform to develop tools, allowing it to act both for its own benefit as a principal and on behalf of its clients in an agency capacity. In doing so, they had to manage the inherent conflicts of interest, which further complicated data access control implementation and privacy assurance.
Solution
To help efficiently manage conflicts of interest, minimize risk at scale, prevent the misuse of client information, and adhere to strict contractual and licensing agreements, the bank needed an all-in-one solution — not a patchwork collection of disparate tools.
To meet these strict regulatory and contractual requirements without delaying speed to insights or impacting customer satisfaction, the bank enlisted Immuta. Immuta’s native integrations with the bank’s core platforms, including Amazon Redshift, Snowflake, and Starburst, meant that access controls could be efficiently and consistently enforced everywhere – without additional manual effort, oversight, or bottlenecks.
Additionally, the bank used Immuta to:
- Ensure that analytical processes for principal and agency activities never cross paths, by segmenting and providing visibility into which users could access which datasets. Immuta’s integration with Amazon Redshift played a pivotal role, allowing data teams to work across both principal and agency projects – and with their BI tools of choice – without raising conflicts of interest.
- Refine electronic trading model algorithms and prohibit traders from seeing pending client orders by anonymizing client transaction data. Immuta’s attribute- and purpose-based access controls dynamically applied anonymization techniques and time-based controls of client execution data, enabling ongoing risk management and model optimization.
- Protect clients’ identities and ensure information was shared only on a need-to-know basis throughout order execution. Immuta’s native integration with Snowflake enabled dynamic access controls and data masking with no performance impacts.
- Hide the information of clients who opted out of allowing their data to be included in aggregate trading volumes or electronic trading model refinement, by enabling row-level redaction.
- Monitor and show who accessed what data, when, and for what purpose in order to prove compliance with regulations, contracts, and data use licenses, using Immuta’s continuous monitoring and auditing reports.
Results
With Immuta, the bank:
- Increased data science productivity by 100% by streamlining operations and accelerating secure data access.
- Combined governance teams dedicated to principal and agency activities, reducing redundancy and costs.
- Gained a competitive advantage and won new institutional trading mandates by using fine-grained access control to guarantee that clients’ confidential trading data would not be misused.
- Reduced the time it takes to perform data licensing audits from weeks to hours.
What It Means For You
Ensuring that the right users are accessing the right data – particularly in highly regulated industries like financial services – is non-negotiable. This is especially true as more human and non-human identities (NHIs), including AI agents, become able to access data independently.
Immuta enables organizations like this bank to collaborate on sensitive data using dynamic controls that can segment users based on various dimensions – including purpose – so data governance teams can balance efficiency and compliance. The Immuta Data Marketplace solution further bolsters these capabilities by allowing teams to publish, find, request, and share curated data products to address real business objectives and drive innovation.