2/28/25, 10:33 PM Fiserv’s Journey to Intelligent Cloud Migration and Optimization with Alation
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Fiserv’s Journey to Intelligent Cloud Migration and Optimization
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By Nick Jewell
Published on June 27, 2024
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Key Insights
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Integrating Alation into the Agile Process
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Key Insights
Fiserv, a leading finance technology services company, supports more than 40% of US banks and has issued 1.6 billion credit cards in the
US for various companies. They stood up a modern data intelligence platform to streamline and federate data usage.
Facing a vast data landscape, the team revolutionized its data management processes with Alation, enabling secure, centralized data
sharing and enhancing operational efficiency across the organization.
With Alation and Snowflake, they built 'Data Compass', to deliver metadata and business intelligence solutions (including risk profiling and
customer 360) throughout the business. Data Compass provides data intelligence across 250,000+ distinct fields from Fiserv core systems
to thousands of registered users. Today, they use Generative AI to convert unstructured data into enriched, documented content within the
Alation platform.
Alation has been paramount in our effort at modernization in that we
want all data to be described and understood by analysts, data scientists,
management, and especially by end users.
Jim Haas
Chief Data Architect, Fiserv
How do people find data in your organization?
Data intelligence, as defined by IDC, is a ‘system to deliver trustworthy data.’ In complex data environments or larger organizations, ensuring
data reliability and accessibility is crucial for making informed business decisions and driving innovation. As a result, data intelligence has
become a critical component of the modern data stack in recent years.
Consider a fundamental question for data leaders: How do people find data in your organization?
This seemingly simple starting point unveils the true complexities of data management, especially when data is scattered across various
departments, applications, and platforms. Finding and trusting data becomes daunting without a cohesive strategy in place, often hampering
decision-making and innovation.
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These questions often escalate from “Where is the data?” to more critical concerns such as “Is the data fresh?” and “How should I use it?” For
analysts and governance teams, questions about data trustworthiness and regulatory compliance are not just theoretical; they directly impact
strategic decisions and operational efficiency. It’s these kinds of questions that keep Chief Data Officers up at night.
Organizations need a reliable data intelligence solution to address these challenges and deliver their data modernization programs. Whether
migrating to the cloud, phasing out legacy systems, or optimizing analytics, a solution must ensure data is not only accessible but also
trustworthy and compliant, supporting ambitious modernization goals.
Jim Haas and Allen Goldschmidt shared the story of the Fiserv data modernization journey at Snowflake Summit 2024; what follows is a recap
of that session, titled “Fiserv’s Journey to Intelligent Cloud Migration and Optimization with Alation” which explores the data management
challenges faced by financial services giants and highlighting the key steps in their successful data modernization journey.
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Fiserv is probably the largest company most people don't know...Some of
the shocking numbers about Fiserv are that we process close to 40% of
the money in the United States on a daily basis. To date, Fiserv has issued
1.6 billion credit cards in the United States for various companies.
Jim Haas
Chief Data Architect, Fiserv
Fiserv, a Fintech leader enabling transactions for thousands of financial institutions and millions of users, illustrates the complexity of
managing vast amounts of data.
Processing transactions for banks and merchants, issuing credit cards, and running operations are just some of the backroom processes that
Fiserv manages for its customers on a daily basis. This means that almost everyone in the United States interacts with a Fiserv service, whether
they realize it or not.
Over 40% of US banks rely on their software, often rebranding Fiserv’s core capabilities with their own logo. Fiserv handles transactions for 3
million merchants in the US alone for retail payments, with many more globally, moving transactions and payments across markets and
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territories. On the consumer side, Fiserv has issued over 1.6 billion credit cards for banks, retailers, and debit providers, and over 90% of US
consumers interact with Fiserv through Point of Sale (PoS) devices in stores and other retail locations.
“Fiserv is probably the largest company most people don’t know…most things are touching Fiserv,” says Jim Haas, Chief Data Architect at Fiserv
and co-presenter for the session at Snowflake Summit 2024.
Beyond these core services, with over 3,000 banks’ operations handled through Fiserv, there’s a broader need for analytical oversight, which
Haas’ team also handles. “Aside from transaction processing and account management, we provide analytics solutions for those banks. Our
main and historical goal is to process data for money, transactions, and bank accounts… we also now help our clients to do analysis on that
data,” adds Haas.
With this diverse landscape of commercial offerings, Fiserv developed a data modernization strategy to ensure data management was cost-
effective for their stakeholders and governed to meet regulatory requirements, but that could remain innovative and flexible for their growing
service offerings. Haas was originally hired to help Fiserv deliver this data modernization program, replacing the legacy stack of technologies
that helped support these critical analytical functions, migrating to the cloud, and ensuring that the analytics computing infrastructure for
Fiserv was ready and resilient for business growth.
“A good part of [data modernization] is bringing in the proper technology such as Snowflake, Alation, and other tools to make it an efficient
operation,” says Haas. “We provide applications that allow [customers] to do Business Intelligence from a hosted solution. Or…they can do
analytics from their location using our solutions.”
To modernize its data infrastructure, Fiserv embarked on a journey to establish a secure, unified data-sharing platform. This involved migrating
clients to data and analytics services through their Snowflake accounts or hosted solutions. This transition aimed to replace fragmented data
exchange methods with a centralized approach, enhancing security and efficiency.
“About three years ago, we started a modernization effort for analytics (for our customers and us),” explains Haas. “Part of that was going to
the Cloud, which involves Snowflake and Alation.”
While a data modernization strategy was embraced as a strategic initiative, significant change in a regulated industry requires close attention to
detail. Haas describes the cloud transformation journey as “a bit tricky because some people think it might be less safe, less secure. However,
we spend a lot of time and effort to make sure it's got all the boxes checked: security, cyber, legal, contractual, and technical. We honestly know
it's safer in a lot of ways.”
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To streamline data exchange and leverage best-of-breed technologies like Snowflake, AWS, Streamsets, BigID, and Theom, Fiserv integrated
Alation as a central data intelligence platform. Alation provided critical insights into data structure and definitions, enabling smooth data
movement and communication between Fiserv and its internal and external customers.
During our cloud migration, part of this is understanding what you have,
whether it’s locked up in people’s heads or in spreadsheets flying around
in an email. Descriptions of data need to be coming from a central,
trusted source…Alation’s central for us for that.
Jim Haas
Chief Data Architect, Fiserv
The data catalog emerged as a critical resource for capturing this institutional knowledge about data, built from users across the company in
many different roles, including business analysts, data scientists, executives, and everyday users. “We connect Alation to our live hosted
systems so that our users understand what data they’re seeing [in] their analytics solutions,” says Haas.
A quote from a Fiserv executive was inspirational throughout the journey: “Data that’s not cataloged is useless to me.” This plain-speaking
message underscored efforts to ensure that every piece of data was accessible, governed, and ultimately valued through a comprehensive data
catalog.
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While centralizing data for analytics is often appealing to executive sponsors, its value diminishes if the organization lacks a clear
understanding of what data is collected and how it can be used. Data intelligence bridges this gap, providing a broader view that makes data
comprehensible and actionable.
To stakeholders at Fiserv, data intelligence is like a 50,000-foot view of what was previously hidden in an organization: it exposes what was
previously hidden and helps users search and discover high-value data from across multiple source systems.
Haas’s experience with Alation helped pinpoint the key value proposition of a data intelligence solution as part of data modernization. “It's really
a mashup of three things: It's a data cataloging feature where you can describe your data. It's got authoring capability, much like Wikipedia. So
you can write articles and information about your data, and it's got the social elements, so you can socialize with your coworkers or others… who
know about the data,” he explains.
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Fiserv took a federated approach to its data catalog implementation. Subject matter experts within early-adopting business units were natural
candidates for data stewards and content creators, with their deep understanding of business terminology and content. This distributed
approach helped Fiserv scale its documented data catalog and governance processes across several extremely large deliverables in the early
stages of the transformation program.
“We had five very large [core banking] systems that process the [transactional] banking data…those can have from 100 to 300 files [and]
thousands of fields coming in from each of them, which is more than most people can keep in their heads,” Haas explains. “So, it needs to be
cataloged and understood. And that's where Alation becomes very valuable.”
This need led to the creation of Fiserv’s ‘Data Compass,’ a service that delivers metadata and business intelligence solutions across various
domains, including risk profiling, customer 360 views, and internal models for merchant risk and marketing. Powered by a Snowflake data
warehouse, the Data Compass service provided stakeholders with comprehensive analytics to enhance decision-making and operational
efficiency.
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With Snowflake, Fiserv realizes the benefits of data sharing across divisions, regions, and business lines with the centralized AI Data Cloud at
the core.
Behind the scenes, Alation data intelligence ensures that data movement is well understood and documented alongside the data assets' core
descriptions. As Haas explains, “With Alation, we will do lineage of that data so we make sure we know what's coming from where to where.
With AI governance, we need to understand all that data coming into a model and make sure everything is safe and proper.”
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Data arrives in a secure landing zone in AWS before being transformed and loaded into Snowflake. Once ingested, Alation captures the critical
business metadata and associated properties ready for use in BI or data sharing in client-owned Snowflake instances.
Beyond the platform itself, governance teams must oversee the data's end-to-end journey as it moves between local data centers, cloud
platforms, and client-owned environments. Haas explains the value of Alation in supporting this process to help Fiserv teams understand the
critical data elements necessary for compliance and control functions.
For a good model management program, we need to trust our models. We
have to make sure our compliance is happy with how those are built and
what data they're using. Alation provides that facility for us to make sure
we know what our data is, where it comes from, and where it's going.
Jim Haas
Chief Data Architect, Fiserv
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Fiserv’s architecture consists of encrypted source systems for core data ingestion, with Snowflake as the central repository for modeling and
integrating data sources. This setup enables the creation of data products for merchant services, credit, and other business functions. An API
layer then decrypts the necessary data, providing visualizations and insights that drive new revenue streams and efficiency improvements.
With over 250,000 fields in its Snowflake database, Alation’s Data Intelligence Platform enabled Fiserv teams to find, understand, and trust
their data at scale. Alation’s capabilities ensured data visibility and reliability across thousands of users and millions of data points, simplifying
data management and enhancing usability.
“Part of our objective is to define all the data in the whole company and every file, database, [and] table,” Haas shares. “We are on the march
to do that in the different business units, and some of it is very far along…It's a multi-year effort to get that all described…In the banking
area, we have petabytes of data, thousands of tables, [and] thousands of fields. It's a very large operation.”
Integrating Alation into the Agile Process
Fiserv actively involves data stewards in upcoming releases to integrate Alation with their agile software development, ensuring alignment
between data management and development. Future plans include automating this integration using Alation APIs, further enhancing agility and
responsiveness.
How does this curated metadata get consumed at Fiserv? Data stewards create the initial content, but new joiners to the firm are guided to
explore and learn from the knowledge base immediately. Advanced users, including analysts and data scientists, are encouraged to drill deeper
into critical data elements, understand compliance policies, and explore data lineage. This approach enhances their ability to derive value from
data and ensures comprehensive knowledge dissemination across the organization.
“One example of how Alation helps us with search and discovery is when we bring in new people,” Haas elaborates. “I have two new people
starting this week, and the first thing they'll do is go into Alation. They'll read about how [Fiserv] data works and understand the
complexities of that data.”
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By implementing Alation, Fiserv has minimized the risks associated with siloed institutional knowledge, which posed significant challenges
when key personnel left the company. The platform’s comprehensive data catalog ensures that knowledge about data origins, transformations,
and applications is preserved and accessible, which is crucial for maintaining legacy systems and mitigating personnel-related risks. Alation’s
‘popularity’ feature, derived from analyzing database query logs, has been instrumental for Fiserv. It identifies the most frequently used data
elements, streamlining data movement and reducing unnecessary transformations. This focus on high-value data significantly reduces
processing costs and time, leading to more efficient data management and substantial cost savings.
Fiserv adopted a federated data stewardship model to scale data governance across its vast organization. This model started with a core team
of experienced stewards and content managers who developed a framework to integrate content from diverse business units into the enterprise
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data catalog. This strategy helped teams move beyond spreadsheets and isolated documentation, promoting consistency and accessibility in
data management.
Once the federated model was established, business units contributed subject matter experts and data stewards to maintain and update their
areas, aligning with Fiserv’s enterprise data vision. The successful pilot program is nearing completion, setting the stage for onboarding
additional units, regions, and product lines and reinforcing a cohesive and proven scalable governance framework.
Having a cloud-based data intelligence platform has also streamlined Fiserv's data modernization journey. As Haas summarizes, along with the
adoption of Snowflake for data sharing with partners, working with Alation as an integrated cloud service has many additional benefits. “We
moved to [the] cloud version of Alation [Alation Cloud Service], and I'm thrilled about it, actually, because it relieves us from having to manage
servers, patch software, worry about operations. It's a beautiful SaaS offering”.
Alation & AI
Allen Goldschmidt, Director of Data Management at Fiserv, also took to the stage at Snowflake Summit 2024 to describe how the Fiserv data
team is using Alation to explore some of the innovations around Generative AI using an “Applied AI Sandbox.”
“We can build things with [Generative AI] that can help us curate data within Alation,” Goldschmidt shared.
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Fiserv is also leveraging Generative AI to transform ad-hoc content, such as spreadsheets and PDF reports, into structured, documented
content within Alation. This innovation delivers seamless integration of previously untapped unstructured data sources, creating consistent and
usable documentation for everyone.
Ad-hoc unstructured content is often difficult for data stewards to extract and document. Yet, it’s a perfect fit for AI's emerging strengths, such
as large language models and Text Extraction. With Generative AI, innovation teams have produced a repeatable template applicable across
Fiserv, standardizing the documentation process and enhancing data consistency for business sources across the enterprise.
“We have a 700-page report from a mainframe in PDF format,” Goldschmidt says. “It’s got headers and page numbers at the bottom. It’s got
things that continue across pages. We’ve implemented a process to use AI to look at those pages and convert that into structured content,
which we can then import into Alation. That worked out really well.”
The team can also use Generative AI to analyze Fiserv’s software code bases, generating non-technical, inherently valuable documentation for
business stakeholders. This approach allows them to derive insights into data lineage from production code, providing a deeper understanding
of how data flows within programming logic and enhancing cross-functional collaboration.
“We’re interested in documentation,” Goldschmidt elaborates. “We’re not the engineering team. We’re interested in getting the meaning
from that code-base and applying it to [data] lineage…it can get the meaning of what you’re trying to do, where your data is going, and how
it’s being transformed.”
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Beyond the basics, Generative AI can interact with enterprise data using natural language queries. By integrating Alation with Retrieval
Augmented Generation (RAG) processing, Fiserv aims to transform business language into precise SQL queries, unlocking valuable insights and
making data exploration more intuitive and accessible.
“This is where AI and Alation shine - giving meaning to the results of that query. It’s not just tables and numbers.”
- Allen Goldschmidt, Director of Data Management, Fiserv
Key Takeaways
Data modernization is an effective digital transformation strategy that enables customers to:
Assess their legacy data landscape automatically and plan for change.
Migrate to the cloud smarter and faster, eliminating data silos and driving AI-readiness.
Optimize and scale strategic data initiatives with a lower Total Cost of Ownership.
Alation is the leading data intelligence platform for supporting each stage of this strategy, identifying, prioritizing, and migrating key data
assets to the cloud. It provides data-driven insights to support continuous, incremental improvement to cloud workloads, BI rationalization, and
ongoing curation, building a stronger data culture that emphasizes search and discovery, governance, data literacy, and the importance of data
leadership to drive the strategy successfully.
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Fiserv’s journey from siloed systems to AI readiness underscores the importance of incremental improvements in data modernization. Large
organizations face challenges with vast data volumes and diverse environments, making comprehensive documentation impractical in a single
effort. Starting with manageable projects and expanding gradually has proven highly effective in building a scalable data intelligence
framework.
Haas and Goldschmidt’s experience highlights the value of starting small and curating data incrementally. Launching pilots with cooperative
business units helps build early momentum, demonstrating value and securing broader support. This iterative approach facilitates stakeholder
buy-in and allows ongoing refinement and scaling of the overall data intelligence strategy.
Defining your users early on is also critical. The audience for a data intelligence platform like Alation will almost certainly include a mixture of
business and technical groups, each with different expectations and requirements.
“I see people in the data catalog … using it to improve their knowledge of our data, not necessarily just to perform a task, but to just educate
themselves in the areas of data that we have,” Goldschmidt shares. “With Alation, we've seen a great improvement in data literacy in the
company, where data that was previously locked away in silos is now available for people to learn about.”
A federated approach that embraces local subject matter experts and data stewards can really bridge the gap between expectations and reality
—setting the right tone, language, and style for a data catalog glossary, capturing lineage in the right level of detail, or making sure that
governance policies are explicitly defined upfront.
When it comes to building a sustainable data intelligence platform, Fiserv has embraced federation to ensure that standards are set at the
enterprise level, but the individual business units have the flexibility to interpret and build out the details to meet their own specific needs,
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optimizing the platform for future success.
Want to learn more about Data Intelligence in Financial Services?
Discover how GXS Bank builds a strong data culture for AI-driven decision-making with Alation.
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