Industry
Banking&Finance
Challenge
Disparate data systems, manual workflows, and legacy architecture hindered ABN AMRO’s regulatory compliance efforts. Fragmented trade data, lack of real-time access, and high operational risk made it difficult to meet MiFID II requirements and respond swiftly to evolving mandates across jurisdictions.
Solution and Results
Datavid extended ABN AMRO’s TradeStore with automated workflows, semantic enrichment, and end-to-end traceability to meet evolving regulatory demands. Within a short timeframe, the bank achieved real-time compliance with MiFID II, reduced manual effort through straight-through processing, and built a scalable data hub ready for future frameworks like FRAAI.
Technology used
Progress MarkLogic, Microsoft Azure, Apache NiFi , Azure DevOps, Spring Boot
About ABN AMRO
ABN AMRO Bank N.V. is one of the Netherlands’ leading financial institutions, headquartered in Amsterdam and employing over 20,000 professionals . Formed through the merger of Algemene Bank Nederland and Amsterdam-Rotterdam Bank, the bank has a long-standing reputation for reliability, innovation, and service across retail, private, and corporate banking.
Setting the Scene
Financial institutions today face a landscape defined by regulatory complexity and rising scrutiny. Since the 2008 global financial crisis, governments and regulatory bodies have introduced sweeping mandates - such as MiFID II, GDPR, and Dodd-Frank - to enhance transparency, reduce systemic risk, and protect investors.
Among these, MiFID II i s one of the most far-reaching, requiring firms to report a significantly broader range of financial instruments with unprecedented data granularity. From 20 to over 65 mandatory fields per transaction, and strict demands for traceability, lineage, and real-time access - compliance has become a full-scale data challenge. For global banks like ABN AMRO, fragmented systems and legacy architecture made this a formidable obstacle.
The Challenges
With MiFID II raising the bar for transparency, ABN AMRO needed more than incremental fixes - it required a fundamental shift in how trade data was managed, reported, and governed.
To meet regulatory demands across multiple jurisdictions and ensure auditability at scale, the bank faced several interrelated challenges:
Each of these pain points stemmed from a common issue: legacy systems that weren’t designed for today’s compliance landscape. From fragmented data across internal platforms to reporting processes reliant on manual intervention, the operational risk was high - and agility low.
More specifically, the bank needed to:
- Consolidate client, order, trade, contract, and reference data from siloed internal systems (OMS, EMS, LEIs, client databases, etc.)
- Meet the expanded MiFID II requirements, including dual reporting obligations across EU and post-Brexit UK jurisdictions
- Enable real-time, audit-ready access to trade data with full traceability
- Automate reporting workflows to reduce operational risk and manual effort
- Future-proof infrastructure against ongoing regulatory changes
- Legacy systems were not designed for this level of transparency or scale. Reporting workflows were heavily manual, data resided in disparate formats (including voice and emails), and reconciliation processes were time-consuming and error-prone.
Without tackling these foundational issues, meeting obligations like FRAAI or responding swiftly to regulatory change would remain slow, error-prone, and risky.
Is your compliance strategy still held back by legacy systems?
ABN AMRO transformed fragmented trade data into a scalable, audit-ready hub - find out what’s possible for you.
The Solution
Extending TradeStore to meet evolving regulatory demands
ABN AMRO had already implemented TradeStore - a centralised trade data hub built on the MarkLogic® Enterprise NoSQL platform - to support its data scientists, business intelligence teams, and compliance requirements, including MiFID II. However, as regulatory expectations grew more complex, the bank needed to expand TradeStore’s capabilities to meet new obligations and enhance control mechanisms.
Datavid partnered with ABN AMRO to extend TradeStore in several strategic areas:
- Support for evolving regulatory requirements, including new compliance obligations such as UK post-Brexit reporting and frameworks like FRAAI
- Implementation of control mechanisms to detect data gaps, processing breaks, and inconsistencies across the reporting pipeline
- Enhancements to data lineage, traceability, and audit-readiness, ensuring reliable responses to regulatory scrutiny
- Optimisation of workflows to reduce manual overhead and mitigate operational risk
By extending and reinforcing TradeStore, Datavid enabled ABN AMRO to remain compliant amid a shifting regulatory landscape - ensuring the platform remains a resilient foundation for future reporting needs.
Why MarkLogic: Tackling technical bottlenecks at scale
ABN AMRO had faced significant technical challenges processing large volumes of structured and unstructured trade data across its internal systems. The adoption of MarkLogic helped overcome these hurdles by enabling:
Solution architecture highlights
- Smart data ingestion: Ingests structured and unstructured data in native formats across internal systems. Validates inputs at source while flagging exceptions for reconciliation—ensuring data completeness and quality from day one.
- Semantic enrichment: Applies metadata and RDF triples to enable data interlinking, lineage tracking, and semantic search—crucial for audit-readiness and contextual reporting.
- Unified storage layers: Maintains original data, materialised views for fast access, and RDF metadata—supporting advanced queries, discoverability, and compliance requirements.
- Real-time reporting: Reusable modules allow customisation for different jurisdictions, regulators, and stakeholders—ensuring compliance agility as rules evolve.
- Full traceability & auditability: All actions—ingestion, reporting, re-reporting—are captured at a granular level, giving auditors complete visibility across the transaction lifecycle.
The Outcomes
Through its collaboration with Datavid, ABN AMRO successfully navigated one of the most complex regulatory shifts in financial services.
Although MiFID II went live in 2018, Datavid began working with the bank only in 2022 - years after the initial implementation. This meant stepping into a highly complex environment shaped by years of evolving business needs, technical debt, and regulatory pressure.
Given the tight timelines and the high stakes of non-compliance - potentially amounting to millions in fines - Datavid’s contribution was critical. The resulting TradeStore platform not only ensures full compliance with MiFID II; it also enhances operational resilience, reduces risk, and positions ABN AMRO for long-term data innovation.
Results:
- Daily compliance with MiFID II reporting requirements across all ABN AMRO entities
- Straight-through processing with minimal manual intervention
- End-to-end traceability ensuring robust audit trails and operational transparency
- Operational efficiency through automated data handling and reporting
- Future-proof infrastructure designed to scale with new regulatory demands. The Trade Store was established as the central data hub for ABN AMRO’s Global Markets trading operations.
- Real-time logic to identify reportable instruments, ensuring trades are flagged for regulatory reporting as they occur
- FRAAI end-of-day reporting supported via TradeStore, consolidating data from multiple upstream systems (via file, web service, etc.), curating it, and delivering structured reports (CSV, Avro, JSON) to downstream consumers
- Full portfolio balancing checks as part of FRAAI end-of-day reporting—implemented as a control mechanism to manage and analyse financial risk by ensuring accuracy across each portfolio.
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