Databricks Inc., developer of an analytics platform based on the Apache Spark framework, today is broadening its push into vertical markets with Lakehouse for Financial Services, a set of pre-built accelerators and open-source libraries for uses in areas like compliance, risk management, fraud and open banking.

The company is also expanding its Delta Sharing open protocol for the secure sharing of data across organizations to financial services companies in a partnership with S&P Global Inc., Nasdaq Inc., FactSet Research Systems Inc. and Intercontinental Exchange Inc.

“The way you interact with money probably hasn’t changed a lot in the last decade,” said Junta Nakai, global industry leader for financial services at Databricks. “There’s been a lack of innovation. There are 17,000 fintechs out there and 194 of them are unicorns. Financial services firms have to start reimagining what they do.”

Built on a multicloud foundation, the Lakehouse for Financial Services is intended to avoid reliance on a single cloud provider, a requirement that regulators in Europe, in particular, are pushing hard right now, Nakai said.

There are 14 libraries covering such areas as risk, stock market investing, regulatory reporting, fraud and open banking. The entire project is also being released to open source, which is another requirement Databricks said it’s hearing from customers.

“They’ve been so burned by the legacy infrastructure,” Nakai said. “The existing tech stack inhibits their ability to innovate. Sixty percent of financial services code is  in Cobol.”

The product suite is being launched with data model frameworks, partner software and accelerators intended to move financial institutions quickly into analytics and address specific problem areas. For example, a post-trade analysis and market surveillance accelerator provides a scalable time-series processing engine and library that joins core market data and disparate alternative data sources, enabling asset managers to test investing strategies at large scale.

There’s also a large geospatial analytics library for credit-card transaction and open banking analytics. It enables high levels of personalization and better understanding of customer transaction behavior required for segmentation and fraud prevention.

Databricks is also announcing that it has joined the Fintech Open Source Foundation, which is part of the Linux Foundation, to support the group’s efforts to facilitate the processing and exchange of financial data throughout the banking ecosystem and to develop new industry standards. The company is the first data analytics provider to join.

“We’re integrating Delta Sharing into the projects they have because banks open-sourced these frameworks in code and this lets them leverage the lakehouse quickly,” Nakai said. The Lakehouse for Financial Services has also been integrated with Legend, a cornerstone Finos project.

This is Databricks’ second foray into vertical markets. Last month the company launched a retail package and it has said healthcare and media are on deck. Nakai said financial services firms spend roughly $500 billion a year on information technology and “the cloud infrastructure part of that is thought to be only 2% to 3%.” JPMorgan Chase & Co. Chief Executive Jamie Dimon recently said his firm plans to spend $12 billion annually on technology, up 26% from two years ago.

Photo: Unsplash