First Data: The big data journey of the world’s biggest payment processor

Let's start the new HUG season in big - let's start with the world's biggest payment processor use case.

As all the huggers know, big data is being thrown around as a silver-bullet solution to enable organizational agility and transformation. All your data in one place sounds great on paper, but is it really? Thomas Place explores the big data journey of the First Data, which came dangerously close to building a data swamp before pivoting to embrace governance and quality-first patterns. This case study includes patterns, partners, successes, failures, and lessons learned to date and reviews the journey ahead.

Thomas Place is the director of data management at First Data Corporation, where he leads enterprise data initiatives. Tom currently focuses on pivoting the organization’s transactional data to a value-add asset through development of an enterprise data lake, governance and quality controls, enabling new product development, and optimization of existing sales channels. Prior to First Data, Tom had over a decade of experience leading enterprise data technology initiatives in capital markets on both the buy and sell side. Tom holds a BSc in computer science from the University of Nottingham in England.