My main use case for Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services revolves around financial services in the banking domain, where a lot of regulations come into play such as BCBS 239. Financial services firms have to take care of GDPR. Therefore, in this highly regulated industry, my company HCLTech won an RFP for managing data quality, data transformations, and data governance for this bank. The client opted for Informatica, which is how we implement Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services in our work.
In my day-to-day work with this client, I use Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services, a suite containing various services including Metadata Command Center and Cloud Data Governance and Catalog, as well as data quality services. Particularly for my data governance role, the two services I used are the Metadata Command Center, which establishes connections with source systems like Oracle database and Cassandra, and the Cloud Data Governance and Catalog, which ingests business metadata for our client. The ultimate goal is to create a relationship between both business and technical metadata.
Regarding workflows, Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services enables automation of the data workflows that significantly reduces manual user efforts. This streamlining allows us to perform tasks including data quality checks, classification, access policy enforcement, and compliance monitoring. Banks can automate complex end-to-end data governance processes with this capability. Moreover, Informatica has deployed an AI agent known as CLAIRE, which autonomously monitors, remediates, and optimizes data workflows, enhancing system intelligence and efficiency. Within Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services, we also leverage Master Data Management, Data Catalog, and CLAIRE GPT, which together facilitate improved credit decisions, data accuracy, regulatory audit support, and enhanced customer experience through effective data governance workflows.
CLAIRE has made a significant difference for my team by automating tasks such as multi-domain record matching. CLAIRE creates a highly accurate golden record of customer data, ensuring consistent and reliable client information across various systems, a necessity for compliance and seamless customer experience. CLAIRE allows users to trace data lineage effortlessly, inferring upstream and downstream data transformations automatically, essential for audits and regulatory reporting. For example, we utilized CLAIRE to continuously monitor data quality and detect anomalies, enforcing our data governance policies with minimal manual intervention. This reduced IT backlogs, provided clean data, fixed any broken pipelines, and allowed our team to focus more on leveraging trusted data for business insights and faster decision-making.
Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services has positively impacted our organization by accelerating data onboarding, improving accuracy, and enabling near real-time data processing. For instance, we employed Informatica's Cloud Native MDM tool, which reduced our data onboarding times by almost 85%. Where batch processing previously took weeks, it now occurs in near real-time, with updates reflected instantly. This efficiency led to a unified customer view accessible across various platforms, thus enhancing personalized customer experiences and operational efficiencies.
The availability of real-time data has significantly enhanced our bank's customer experience and operational efficiency. For example, call center agents now have access to a near-real-time unified customer view, which has reduced call volumes by up to 50% and improved response accuracy. Moreover, we have decreased call transfers by approximately 70%, resulting in a smoother customer journey and heightened satisfaction due to prompt issue resolution.
While Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services excels according to the Gartner report, which ranks it as the leading tool, I believe there are areas for improvement, such as enhancing user experience with a more intuitive UI, providing features including bulk data management, and simplifying complex configurations for Master Data Management. Additionally, connectors for SAP could be streamlined to lessen dependencies on Informatica personnel. From a performance standpoint, some users have noted limitations when handling large volumes, particularly in the cloud application integration aspect of Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services, suggesting a need for improved caching and API handling.
One improvement needed for Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services that I have not mentioned yet is performance enhancement for large API loads. Utilizing bulk API and processing records in parallel batches could significantly improve throughput compared to row-by-row processing.
I have been working in data governance for over six years.
Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services is very stable.
Our experience with Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services' scalability shows that it effectively supports enterprise-wide customer views and can scale data workflows efficiently. CLAIRE's AI-driven automation allows for thousands of data tasks to be performed concurrently, with native support for hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services excels in real-time data processing, metadata management, and multi-domain MDM, enabling us to address use cases requiring global regulatory reporting and risk modeling. I firmly believe that Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services is a highly scalable tool.
My experience with the customer support team has been superb, and I have had a positive interaction with them.
Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services typically follows a subscription-based pricing model that charges per user, data volume, or the number of connectors. Depending on which modules we use, the charges vary. While overall costs can be higher compared to competitors due to Informatica's advanced features and AI capabilities, this flexible pricing allows us to choose only the components relevant to our needs. However, the initial setup requires involvement from Informatica experts, due to its comprehensive platform needing custom configurations aligned with our bank's security frameworks and compliance.
Since deploying Informatica over a year and a half ago, we have experienced substantial cost savings by reducing on-premises infrastructure and maintenance expenses. The data processing time in our bank's backend systems has decreased by nearly 40 to 50%, providing us with valuable business insights and operational workflows. Overall, we have realized a solid return on investment using Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services.
We evaluated Microsoft Purview, Collibra, and Informatica before making our choice, ultimately selecting Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services.
Informatica's documentation and training are superb compared to other tools in data governance and management. I have personally completed around 32 or 33 certifications from Informatica's partner portal, which provides access to foundation level certifications and advanced boot camps. Informatica's training resources are exceptional, with abundant learning materials available, and even for those without access to the tool, numerous tutorials can be found on YouTube. Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services sets the golden standard for training and documentation in this space.
My advice for others considering Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services is not to select any tool without conducting a thorough business needs assessment first. Each organization, even within banking, may have varying requirements. Starting with clear goals and understanding the organizational structure in terms of data governance roles is essential. Additionally, defining data governance policies will guide your framework effectively before identifying the appropriate tool. I would rate this product a 10 out of 10.
