In today’s fast-paced financial services environment, data is more than just numbers—it’s the foundation for strategic decisions, customer insights, and operational efficiency. One of India’s prominent non-banking financial companies (NBFCs), with a strong focus on home finance, faced mounting challenges in managing its growing data volumes and delivering timely insights to business stakeholders.

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The Challenge: Fragmented Data, Delayed Decisions

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The organization struggled with:

• Lack of real-time data pipelines, leading to delayed insights
• Inconsistent KPI logic across departments, resulting in misaligned decisions
• Frequent null values in reports due to inefficient data refresh methods
• High infrastructure costs from legacy systems
• Absence of data lineage and cataloging, which slowed down analytics and onboarding

These issues not only hampered decision-making but also eroded trust in the data and increased operational overhead.

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The Solution: Unified Data Platform on Databricks

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To address these challenges, the company partnered with Exponentia.ai to implement a modern, scalable data architecture. The solution included:

• Databricks-based Unified Data Platform (UDP) using the Medallion architecture (Bronze, Silver, Gold layers)
• Delta Live Tables (DLT) for real-time and incremental data loading
• Unity Catalog for centralized data governance, lineage tracking, and business glossary
• MLflow for machine learning model development and deployment
• Power BI dashboards connected via Databricks SQL endpoints for real-time reporting

This architecture enabled seamless ingestion from MSSQL via Azure Data Factory, transformation using Apache Spark, and consumption through BI tools and APIs.

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Architecture Snapshot

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The solution architecture featured:

• Batch and near real-time ingestion using Change Data Capture (CDC)
• Delta tables stored in ADLS Gen2
• ML models integrated with MLflow for predictive analytics\
• Role-based and attribute-based access controls via Unity Catalog
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The Impact: Speed, Savings, and Scalability

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The transformation delivered measurable business outcomes:

• 40% reduction in annual infrastructure costs
• 3X faster data refresh cycles, completing within an hour
• Near real-time sales reporting, improving responsiveness
• Month-on-month reporting for strategic planning
• Advanced data governance with column-level masking and row-level access control

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Conclusion

By embracing a unified data platform and modern cloud-native tools, the NBFC not only resolved its data challenges but also laid the foundation for scalable analytics, AI-driven insights, and robust governance. This transformation is a testament to how financial institutions can unlock the full potential of their data to drive growth, efficiency, and customer-centric innovation.

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