Data Engineering for Banks [Part-1]: Why EU Banks Need Stronger Data Engineering?

2025 is a defining year for banking data.

From the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) going live, to ESG disclosures gaining teeth, to the rapid onboarding of real-time payment infrastructure, EU banks are under more pressure than ever to move clean, traceable, and timely data across their systems.
But here’s what many banks are quietly experiencing behind the scenes: the problem isn’t the lack of data. It’s the lack of usable data.

That’s why we’re launching this new blog series – Data Engineering for Banking. It’s designed specifically for professionals working across compliance, risk, operations, and IT in financial institutions.

This first article lays the foundation: why data engineering is now a board-level topic in EU banking, and how fragmented data impacts both compliance and business intelligence.

Compliance is Getting Stricter and Faster

Internal Realities

In 2024, the European Banking Authority (EBA) highlighted that banks are still struggling with timely, consistent data delivery for supervision.

They further highlighted that much of the supervisory burden today comes not from analysis but from the work needed to collect, validate, and align data in the first place.

This has led the EBA and ECB to push for “data-at-the-source” approaches, expecting that your systems can trace, explain, and reconcile the numbers directly.

External Realities

→ DORA is now active, and banks must show how their data systems handle outages, recoveries, and fraud scenarios.

→ AMLD6 requires clear tracking of suspicious transactions, with source data, transformation logic, and alerts, all auditable.

→ GDPR fines related to poor data lineage and consent tracking have crossed €350M across EU banks since 2022.

→ ESG frameworks, including CSRD, now require environmental and financial data to match. Hence, banks can’t afford inconsistencies.

In short, both internal needs (risk teams, boards, audits) and external regulators (AML, GDPR, ECB) now expect your data to be accurate, traceable, and delivered at speed. That’s not possible without a well-engineered data infrastructure.

The Cost of Missed Intelligence in Day-to-Day Banking

For many banks, analytics tools are already in place. But when critical intelligence comes in late, or data lives in disconnected silos, teams are left reacting instead of responding.

Here’s what that looks like in 2025 and why it’s costing you.

Delays in Fraud Detection

According to UK Finance’s 2025 Fraud Report, over £1.17 billion was lost to scams in the past year, with a 12% rise in fraud incidents. A large portion of this is now AI-generated scams that target customers across channels in real time.

Yet, many banks are still processing fraud alerts with a 24–48 hour lag.

However, leading UK banks (Barclays, HSBC, Santander) have now begun sharing live fraud signals, including suspicious URLs and transaction patterns which enables them to act at least 24 hours earlier.

Financial Times

Meta’s head of security policy, Nathaniel Gleicher, said the company would “continue to invest heavily in detection and enforcement” and work with governments, banks, and peers to disrupt “transnational scammers”.

Advanced Analytics vs. Data Flow

A TrustDecision study found that banks with structured, streaming data pipelines catch fraud 60% faster and reduce false alerts by 40%, compared to banks with legacy batch data feeds.

Similarly, Feedzai’s 2025 Financial Crime Trends Report shows that 90% of financial institutions now rely on real-time AI for detecting fraud.
Despite AI’s proven benefits, data management remains a significant challenge for financial institutions.

In fact, 87% of banks cite data management as their biggest hurdle, with fragmented data sources and regulatory constraints slowing AI adoption, particularly among smaller institutions.

It’s Costing Millions

In Europe, Tietoevry’s 2025 fraud report highlights a 156% surge in social-engineered scams and a 77% increase in phishing year-over-year.

These attacks require instant detection across channels, something typical batch systems can’t support.

Real-Time Compliance Pressure

As of January 2025, the EU Instant Payments Regulation requires all euro payments to be processed within 10 seconds. That means banks must:

✔️ Detect fraud before the payment clears.

✔️ Correlate customer activity across channels.

✔️ Log and trace decisions, instantly.

Without a real-time data architecture, this level of performance is difficult (if not impossible) to achieve.

What’s Really Holding Banks Back?

Most banks are not short on data. They’re short on movement and structure.

What Good Data Engineering Looks Like in Banks?

By now, it’s clear that the issue is not about having data but how that data moves, how it’s cleaned, and how quickly it reaches the people who need it.

In most banks, data has to pass through too many hands before it becomes usable.

Data engineering is what fixes that.

Not by replacing systems overnight, but by setting up strong connections, reliable flows, and built-in checks so your reports, alerts, and decisions are built on clean, trusted information.

Here are a few examples of good data engineering in a banking setup:

Time to Rebuild Your Core, Not Just Your Edge

Many EU banks are investing in AI, analytics, and digital onboarding. But those investments won’t deliver if the data underneath is broken.

Instead of focusing only on the front end, ask:

→ Can your reports and alerts be traced in minutes?

→ Are your compliance dashboards built on clean, explainable data?

→ Can operations, risk, and fraud teams rely on the same unified data flow?

If the answer is uncertain, now’s the time to assess and strengthen your bank’s data foundation.

Up Next in the Series: Start with a Data Assessment

Before building pipelines or platforms, every bank needs to answer one question: Where does your data stand today?

In our next blog, we’ll walk through how EU banks can run a clear, risk-aware data assessment. It’ll cover lineage gaps, regulatory exposure, and operational readiness.

Stay tuned!