Coface is a credit insurer operating globally, offering companies solutions to protect them against the risk of the financial default of their clients, both in their domestic and export markets. In 2020, Coface employed over 4,400 people and registered a turnover of $1.56 billion.
A Virtual Data Lake
As a large, geographically dispersed financial services organization, Coface faces a myriad of regulatory and compliance challenges. Additionally, Coface wanted to improve operational efficiency and spur business growth by introducing innovative business use cases. The primary requirement for dealing with the above challenges was of the ability to provide holistic data in the right context. However, integrating that data from internal and external data sources, including on-premises and cloud systems, was unsustainably complex.
After a series of assessments, Coface leveraged the Denodo Platform, powered by data virtualization, to create a virtual data lake. The new virtual data lake offers three main advantages over a physical data lake: It reduces development costs (metadata specifications need only be defined once and can be reused many times), it accelerates development (there is no need to learn the technical languages and APIs of the original data sources), and it increases report and analytical consistency. In addition, by enabling the centralization of business rules, the Denodo Platform ensures that compliance checks and audits can be more quickly and accurately completed. Shortly after implementing the Denodo Platform, Coface was able to move 25 use cases into production that were being served through the virtual data lake. Users at Coface find that the Denodo Platform is the right tool for collaborative, flexible work.