Data governance platforms help financial institutions wrangle and understand their vast swathes of data while maintaining regulatory compliance, ultimately allowing them to compete with digital upstarts by delivering enhanced customer experiences more quickly.  

Data scientists, analysts, and engineers at $207 billion-asset Fifth Third use collaborative data platform Alation to understand and take advantage of all the bank’s data, ensuring that the right people have access to the right information at the right time.  

Alation’s technology – which combines machine learning and human input to label, organize, govern, and share data – helps massive organizations like Fifth Third save time and money (Forrester estimates that the platform can save customers 211 workdays by auto-classifying data and $2.7 million in productivity improvements). 

To compete with “digitally born, direct-to-consumer” neobanks, legacy financial institutions need to optimize their data use “to gain efficiency and better understand their customers,” Alation CTO John Willis told Insights Distilled. The platform can help incumbents launch new features, faster, he said.  

Alation just raised a $123 million Series E round, which included minority investments from HPE, Salesforce, Dell, and Insight portfolio company Databricks. Its competitors include Collibra (used by DNB Bank and Credit Suisse) and Ataccama (used by Aviva and Société Générale).