Emirates NBD Partners with Hortonworks to Deliver on Big Data Ambitions

Emirates NBD, a leading bank in the region, has signed a new strategic partnership with Hortonworks, the industry leader in connected data platforms. As a key milestone in the bank’s continued AED 1 billion digital transformation journey, Emirates NBD is now on-track to transition to real-time data flows in Q1-2019; enabling instant customer and operational insight, and fraud-detection.

The partnership focuses on building a world-class Enterprise Data Platform (EDP). By providing data-driven analytics and operational intelligence, this will significantly enhance the customer experience through deeper, more personalized customer insights, and by underpinning key initiatives in Emirates NBD’s digital strategy including blockchain, artificial intelligence and machine learning. Transaction security will also be enhanced through real-time predictive analytics that inform fraud models.

With Hortonworks’ world-class and scalable Hadoop platform leveraged to form the bank’s EDP foundation, Emirates NBD’s new, dedicated team of Data specialists are now focused on accelerating the bank’s data capabilities. This includes ensuring all trusted data is available centrally and securely to users via the EDP with automated reporting functionality. Real time cross-enterprise data flows are targeted for early 2019 to support real-time actionable insights.

Abdulla Qassem, Group Chief Operating Officer, Emirates NBD, said “Today’s information-driven economy means data is one of our most critical assets. Aligned with our digital strategy, we are committed to harnessing the power of data to drive deep customer insight, accelerate our time-to-market for emerging digital innovation that is reliant on such data, and to leverage advanced analytics to enhance business performance. We have selected Hortonworks as our strategic partner given their commitment to innovation particularly through their industry-leading Hadoop platform. We now look forward to working together to ensure our increasingly robust business intelligence insights directly enhance our competitiveness, customer-centricity and digitization.”

Kamal Brar, Vice President of Asia Pacific and Middle East, Hortonworks said: “Data is becoming the new currency and organizations adopting a modern data architecture are uncovering new opportunities and efficiencies by breaking down siloes and managing all data in a flexible and open platform. We are proud to partner with an innovator like Emirates NBD and look forward to helping them deliver even more value to their customers.”

Building and deploying a dedicated EDP is a key milestone in Emirates NBD’s four-year digital transformation that is now in its second phase. The transformation initiative was announced in 2016 and includes an end-to-end upgrade to Emirates NBD’s capabilities across data, as well as IT architecture, infrastructure and security, and in terms of its IT-business model.