How a Nasdaq-Listed Regional Bank Saved 110 Hours Weekly with Decube

Financial Services (Regional Banking)

United States

Discover how automated lineage and metadata discovery reduced manual effort and gave teams trusted enterprise context.

Key outcome
110 man-hours saved

Over a hundred hours saved per week on data discovery and lineage management

Decube modules
Column-level Lineage
Incident Detection & Management
Metadata Management
Regulatory driver

FDIC and Federal Reserve data governance expectations, SOX compliance for public financial reporting

The challenge

The bank's U.S. data platform spans Spark for processing, Azure Synapse as the analytics warehouse, ADLS for storage, Azure Data Factory for orchestration, and Power BI for reporting. Every one of those systems held its own fragment of metadata, but nothing connected them. Tracing lineage across the pipeline was a manual exercise, engineers piecing together ADF pipeline definitions, Synapse query logs, and Power BI dataset dependencies by hand every time a question came up.

That manual effort was compounding two other pressures. The bank was formalizing a broader data governance framework and needed a consolidated, trustworthy view of metadata across the estate to underpin it, not scattered documentation living in different tools. At the same time, data quality incidents were being handled ad hoc: when something broke, there was no structured way to triage it, assign ownership, or track resolution, so incident management consumed disproportionate time relative to the actual scale of the problems.

The solution

Decube was brought in to sit across the full Azure-based stack, Spark, Synapse, ADLS, ADF, and Power BI, as a single connected metadata and lineage layer rather than another siloed tool. Three factors drove the decision: adoption had to be simple enough that teams would actually use it without a heavy change-management push, the architecture needed to scale cleanly as the bank's data estate grew, and, as a Nasdaq-listed bank operating under FDIC, Federal Reserve, and SOX reporting requirements, security had to be built in rather than bolted on.

Rollout connected each system in the stack to build automated, column-level lineage end to end, established a shared metadata layer to anchor the governance framework, and introduced a structured workflow for logging, assigning, and resolving data quality incidents.

Results in practice

Automated lineage across a five-tool stack

Lineage across Spark, Synapse, ADLS, ADF, and Power BI is now generated automatically instead of pieced together by hand. Discovery and lineage work that used to consume significant engineering time is now a lookup, freeing up 110 man-hours a week that previously went into manual tracing.

‍

A metadata foundation for the governance framework

Instead of governance policy sitting apart from the data itself, metadata pulled from across the stack now gives the governance framework a single, consistent source to build on, rather than requiring teams to reconcile definitions across five different tools.

‍

Structured data quality incident management

Data quality issues now move through a defined workflow, logged, assigned to an owner, and tracked to resolution, replacing the previous ad hoc approach where incidents were handled inconsistently depending on who noticed first.

The outcome

The headline number is 110 man-hours saved every week on data discovery and lineage management, time now redirected from manual tracing to higher-value engineering and governance work. Alongside that, the bank now has a consolidated metadata layer supporting its governance framework rollout and a structured process for managing data quality incidents as they arise.

“We were spending close to three days a week across the team just piecing lineage back together by hand. Getting that time back has let us actually focus on the governance work we set out to do in the first place.”

— Head of Data Governance

Ready to reclaim valuable time?

Nasdaq-listed banks operating under FDIC, Federal Reserve, and SOX reporting requirements are under constant pressure to prove data governance maturity without pulling engineers off higher-value work. See how Decube's unified metadata, lineage, and incident management layer can free up your team's time. Book a demo.

Book a 30-min demo