Collibra: safe and secure digital disruption of finance giants

Collibra: safe and secure digital disruption of finance giants

In 2008, nobody was really talking about Big data – but the financial crash led to more stringent regulatory requirements for banks to manage the sensitive information they possessed. Meanwhile, data governance firm Collibra was formed out of the University of Belgium’s research into semantic technology. CEO and co-founder Felix Van de Maele explains: “We were researching how to bring domain experts together and help figure out what data really means, because semantic technology is about how you define data in a way that it can be understood not just by people, but also by computers.”

Now, financial institutions had to be even more in control of their data, knowing where it was coming from, who was responsible for it, and that processes were in place to fix any problems that cropped up. Since this initial approach to compliance, which was defensive and reactive, data has been brought to the fore of the finance industry. Fast forward to 2019 and Chief Data Officer is a key role for companies as data management is recognised as a core strategic function. “Today, data drives the whole digital transformation,” says Van de Maele. “AI, machine learning, IoT: it’s all about data.”

Nowadays, financial institutions are not just in competition with each other, but with all kinds of client-facing organisations which serve an increasingly demanding consumer with their efficiency and ease of use. “Today, it’s not just about compliance. It’s about how we can compete with those data first companies like Google, Amazon or Facebook,” Van de Maele explains. “How can we extract more value? How can we serve our customers better? How can we build better products?”

Extracting value from the reams of data available nowadays and using this to disrupt the financial landscape is where Collibra comes in. “We believe data is becoming so valuable we need to treat it as a real asset and a key part of the business process. Just like you have SAP to automate and formalise your financial processes and Salesforce for your customer processes, you need a system to run and support your data processes.” Collibra’s data governance products and solutions are instrumental in helping organisations unlock the value of data, whilst remaining secure and compliant with regulations such as GDPR. “We are, so to speak, the system of record for the data team.”

It’s certainly a service with high demand – last year, the company celebrated a growth rate of 80% and today it serves around 300 customers including some of the largest companies in the world. In January, Collibra raised $100mn in its Series E funding round, led by Google’s investment arm Capital G. This brought the company’s value to over $1bn, affording it unicorn status. “We were very happy that CapitalG and Google reached out to us because the Google engineers said: ‘This is a really important problem and Collibra is the company that’s solving it in the best way.

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