Why Financial Institutions Are Replacing Legacy Integration with Operational Data Hubs-Tapdata

Why Financial Institutions Are Replacing Legacy Integration with Operational Data Hubs

Sep 26,2025

The Financial Industry’s Real-Time Mandate

In a sector where milliseconds can matter, data latency, inconsistency, and fragmentation are no longer tolerable.

Banks and insurance companies operate dozens — if not hundreds — of core systems: core banking, CRM, payment gateways, risk control, regulatory reporting, customer service platforms, and more.

Traditionally, these systems are integrated via point-to-point APIs, ESBs, or batch ETL jobs — methods that introduce delay, complexity, and governance risk.

To stay competitive, more financial institutions are replacing these legacy patterns with a modern operational data hub (ODH) — a real-time data integration layer designed for speed, scale, and trust.

Unlike traditional data pipelines, this architecture promotes a data hub model: unified, streaming, and event-driven by design.

What Is an Operational Data Hub in Financial Services?

An operational data hub is a centralized platform that:

Captures real-time changes from core systems
Transforms and routes data across applications
Provides live, queryable views for analytics, dashboards, and APIs
Enables observability, lineage, and auditability for compliance

In finance, this means:

Real-time customer 360 for relationship managers
Instant synchronization between trading, risk, and settlement systems
Live reporting to meet daily liquidity and credit exposure requirements
Supporting regulators with timely, traceable data pipelines

Common Financial Use Cases for Operational Data Hubs

Real-Time Customer 360 with Operational Data Hub Architecture

Banks often struggle to unify customer data across deposit, loan, investment, and service systems.

An operational data hub enables:

Unified customer profiles from multiple source systems
Instant updates reflected in CRM dashboards and mobile apps
Context-rich alerts for RM teams (e.g., large deposit, triggered thresholds)
Integration with call center systems and self-service platforms

Regulatory Reporting and Audit Readiness

Financial regulators demand increasingly granular, traceable, and timely data submissions.

ODHs provide:

Real-time data integration pipelines from core systems to regulatory data views
Versioned, queryable materialized datasets with rollback support
A unified data hub approach to eliminate inconsistencies across departments

Decoupling Legacy Core Banking Systems

Many banks are undertaking legacy modernization by extracting operational and customer data from monolithic core banking systems into real-time operational data hubs.

This approach embraces an event-driven architecture, enabling faster downstream sync and analytics without putting stress on fragile transactional systems.

Operational data hubs allow:

Non-invasive CDC replication from legacy databases
Integration with modern microservices (payments, risk scoring, etc.)
A progressive approach to modernization — no big bang cutovers

How TapData Enables Data Hubs in Financial Architecture

TapData delivers key capabilities financial institutions need to build enterprise-grade operational data hubs:

Log-based CDC for Oracle, DB2, SQL Server, MySQL, PostgreSQL…
Real-time pipelines to MongoDB, Kafka, ClickHouse, or PostgreSQL-based stores…
Materialized views auto-refreshed for BI or API endpoints
Built-in schema mapping, evolution tracking, and transformation logic
High-throughput + sub-second latency, even under heavy transaction loads
No-code visual interface for faster project delivery and governance alignment

TapData helps banks reduce vendor lock-in, lower operational overhead, and enable streaming data access in a traditionally batch-heavy environment.

Real-World Example: Accelerating Risk Data Integration for a Regional Bank

A mid-sized commercial bank faced a challenge: consolidate real-time risk exposure data across four separate systems — credit, derivatives, collateral, and trading.

With TapData:

They deployed log-based CDC pipelines to stream updates into a centralized ClickHouse store
Risk dashboards were updated every 2 seconds, not 2 hours
Regulatory stress test scenarios could be simulated using up-to-date exposure metrics
Legacy core systems remained untouched — reducing IT risk

Summary: Real-Time Integration Is Now a Requirement

In finance, latency is risk. A well-designed operational data hub enables institutions to move fast while staying compliant.

By adopting real-time integration platforms like TapData, banks and insurers can reduce complexity, empower teams with live data, and build the foundation for AI, automation, and digital innovation.

Looking to unify your financial data in real time? → Explore TapData’s operational data hub solutions

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What Is an Operational Data Hub?
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A Modern Alternative to ESBs: Why Enterprises Are Moving to Operational Data Hubs
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Operational Data Hub Implementation Pitfalls — and How to Avoid Them

Sep 26,2025