Legal & General Investment Management (LGIM) is one of the largest global asset managers, managing £1.2 trillion on behalf of savers, retirees, and institutions worldwide. LGIM prides itself on being a responsible investor and is at the forefront of global index fund management and pension investment. Its strategies cover a broad array of asset classes and styles, including equities, bonds, property and alternatives, as well as multi-asset funds.
Implementing a cohesive data vision
LGIM’s Global Chief Operating Office is responsible for the company’s technology, data, client servicing and the management of its strategic operating agenda. This includes delivering a transformation project to modernize LGIM, enable growth, and introduce more scalable and seamless services. In his role as LGIM’s Chief Technology Officer, Derrick Hastie is key to supporting this transformational agenda. He is responsible for introducing common tools and processes and enhancing the technology, tools and data available to employees, empowering them to use their expertise and creativity in innovative ways.
LGIM’s data ecosystem had become fragmented over time as it had grown. Data was hidden in silos and line-of-business teams were using multiple data management and analytics tools, many of which were not used to their full capability. To enable LGIM to better utilize its wealth of data, LGIM required a centralized platform that made internal data discovery easy for all teams and could securely integrate external partners and third-party outsourced data pipelines. To realize this cohesive data vision, LGIM adopted Cloudera Data Platform (CDP) Public Cloud.
“Cloudera provides us with the functionality to manage our entire data lifecycle, it’s my role to ensure that IT is collaborating with business teams to make certain they are armed with tools to create data products that effectively serve our clients. Moreover, widespread adoption of the platform allows our employees to unlock value from our data assets,” comments Derrick Hastie, CTO at LGIM.
A bridge between IT and business teams
LGIM worked with Cloudera’s Professional Services Team to build a centralized Data Marketplace that fosters a two-way relationship between technology and the business. The marketplace delivers a data-centric operating environment by increasing data accessibility and enabling advanced analytics. This allows LGIM’s business teams to focus on value creation by unlocking insights from market, trading, and risk data to better serve clients.
This cross-organizational approach that CDP facilitates has improved collaboration between LGIM’s IT and business teams, as well as reducing the number of local applications and tooling that IT has to manage. Data is now also linked bi-directionally throughout LGIM’s operations. The seamless inflow of retained and external datasets via CDP allows teams to create datasets locally and make them available for others to consume without the need for assistance from data engineers. As LGIM adds more use cases to the platform, its technical teams continue to work with Cloudera Professional Services to accelerate delivery, onboarding and optimization of additional workloads.
Data access unlocks new opportunities and builds resilience
CDP’s reliable and scalable architecture ensures data is always available, so LGIM can continuously offer its industry expertise to achieve positive long-term outcomes for its clients, investors and stakeholders. The out-of-the-box functionality of CDP also meant the LGIM IT team did not need to spend significant time integrating different tools, so it could more easily fulfill data lineage requirements and be confident its data is traceable and compliant.
“Cloudera Data Platform gives us confidence against the backdrop of a continually changing regulatory landscape. We know our Data Marketplace can run in the cloud or on-prem, and that we have full traceability of where data comes from, and where it leaves,” concluded Hastie.
Through implementing Cloudera public cloud on AWS, Legal and General Investment Management (LGIM) has been able to unleash data value with a sophisticated architectural runway realizing up to 45% savings in infrastructure costs for long-running workloads. Please read the full story here.