The Financial Industry’s Real-Time Mandate
In a sector where milliseconds can matter, data latency, inconsistency, and fragmentation are no longer tolerable.
Banks and insurance companies operate dozens — if not hundreds — of core systems: core banking, CRM, payment gateways, risk control, regulatory reporting, customer service platforms, and more.
Traditionally, these systems are integrated via point-to-point APIs, ESBs, or batch ETL jobs — methods that introduce delay, complexity, and governance risk.
To stay competitive, more financial institutions are replacing these legacy patterns with a modern operational data hub (ODH) — a real-time data integration layer designed for speed, scale, and trust.
Unlike traditional data pipelines, this architecture promotes a data hub model: unified, streaming, and event-driven by design.
What Is an Operational Data Hub in Financial Services?
An operational data hub is a centralized platform that:
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Captures real-time changes from core systems
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Transforms and routes data across applications
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Provides live, queryable views for analytics, dashboards, and APIs
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Enables observability, lineage, and auditability for compliance
In finance, this means:
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Real-time customer 360 for relationship managers
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Instant synchronization between trading, risk, and settlement systems
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Live reporting to meet daily liquidity and credit exposure requirements
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Supporting regulators with timely, traceable data pipelines
Common Financial Use Cases for Operational Data Hubs
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Real-Time Customer 360 with Operational Data Hub Architecture
Banks often struggle to unify customer data across deposit, loan, investment, and service systems.
An operational data hub enables:
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Unified customer profiles from multiple source systems
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Instant updates reflected in CRM dashboards and mobile apps
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Context-rich alerts for RM teams (e.g., large deposit, triggered thresholds)
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Integration with call center systems and self-service platforms
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Regulatory Reporting and Audit Readiness
Financial regulators demand increasingly granular, traceable, and timely data submissions.
ODHs provide:
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Real-time data integration pipelines from core systems to regulatory data views
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Versioned, queryable materialized datasets with rollback support
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A unified data hub approach to eliminate inconsistencies across departments
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Decoupling Legacy Core Banking Systems
Many banks are undertaking legacy modernization by extracting operational and customer data from monolithic core banking systems into real-time operational data hubs.
This approach embraces an event-driven architecture, enabling faster downstream sync and analytics without putting stress on fragile transactional systems.
Operational data hubs allow:
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Non-invasive CDC replication from legacy databases
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Integration with modern microservices (payments, risk scoring, etc.)
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A progressive approach to modernization — no big bang cutovers
How TapData Enables Data Hubs in Financial Architecture
TapData delivers key capabilities financial institutions need to build enterprise-grade operational data hubs:
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Log-based CDC for Oracle, DB2, SQL Server, MySQL, PostgreSQL…
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Real-time pipelines to MongoDB, Kafka, ClickHouse, or PostgreSQL-based stores…
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Materialized views auto-refreshed for BI or API endpoints
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Built-in schema mapping, evolution tracking, and transformation logic
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High-throughput + sub-second latency, even under heavy transaction loads
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No-code visual interface for faster project delivery and governance alignment
TapData helps banks reduce vendor lock-in, lower operational overhead, and enable streaming data access in a traditionally batch-heavy environment.
Real-World Example: Accelerating Risk Data Integration for a Regional Bank
A mid-sized commercial bank faced a challenge: consolidate real-time risk exposure data across four separate systems — credit, derivatives, collateral, and trading.
With TapData:
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They deployed log-based CDC pipelines to stream updates into a centralized ClickHouse store
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Risk dashboards were updated every 2 seconds, not 2 hours
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Regulatory stress test scenarios could be simulated using up-to-date exposure metrics
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Legacy core systems remained untouched — reducing IT risk
Summary: Real-Time Integration Is Now a Requirement
In finance, latency is risk. A well-designed operational data hub enables institutions to move fast while staying compliant.
By adopting real-time integration platforms like TapData, banks and insurers can reduce complexity, empower teams with live data, and build the foundation for AI, automation, and digital innovation.
Looking to unify your financial data in real time? → Explore TapData’s operational data hub solutions
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