Wednesday, August 26, 11:00 AM EST

The Single Front Door for Data: How Northern Trust Won the Modeling Battle

A practitioner-led session on how one of the world's largest financial institutions turned fragmented, hand-coded data into a governed, enterprise-scale modeling discipline.

As financial institutions modernize their data platforms, the gap between raw data and trusted, reusable models remains one of the hardest problems to solve at scale. Ad-hoc transformations, undocumented conventions, and siloed tooling compound over years, until the cost of complexity outpaces the pace of delivery.

In this session, Jez Davies, Chief Information Architect at Northern Trust, and Serge Gershkovich, Head of Product at SqlDBM, walk through the real journey: from a legacy modeling environment with no standards, no shared tooling, and no enforceability to a bank-wide single front door feeding dbt pipelines directly into Snowflake and Databricks. Jez shares the decisions, tradeoffs, and hard-won outcomes from the inside.

You'll learn how leading data teams:

• Establish and enforce modeling standards across hundreds of engineers and data consumers
• Replace hand-coded SQL complexity with governed, reusable Data Vault, Dimensional, and Semantic models
• Use a modeling workbench as a force multiplier, cutting new data product delivery from weeks to days
• Forward-engineer directly into dbt, eliminating the gap between design and deployment
• Build an information architecture function that scales with the business

This session is designed for:

• Data Architects
• Data Engineers
• Chief Data Officers and Information Architects
• Analytics and Platform Teams operating in regulated industries or at enterprise scale