S2 Ep2. Federated Data Governance in Banking: How ABN AMRO Scaled from 300 Data Owners to 15 Data Domains - The Data Playbook Podcast
Description
How do you turn governance from a bottleneck into a business accelerator - in a bank?
In this episode of The Data Playbook, host Kris Peeters talks with Jan Mark Pleijsant, Senior Data Strategy & Governance Advisor at ABN AMRO Bank, about their move from 300+ dispersed data owners to 15 clear, business-aligned data domains and what it took to make federated governance work in a highly regulated environment.
You’ll learn:
- Why “governance police” fails and how a federated model balances autonomy with oversight.
- How ABN AMRO defined domains by the nature of data (customer, loans, payments) rather than shifting business units driving stability across reorganisations.
- What “governance by design” looks like in practice (policies, standards, data lineage, quality, clear ownership).
- The evolution from golden (source-aligned) datasets to consumer-ready data products (“pre-packaged salads”) that speed time-to-insight.
- Why executive sponsorship, domain maturity, and delivery discipline are the real success factors.
- How to measure domain maturity, prioritize critical reports (e.g., regulatory & exec dashboards), and avoid endless debates over definitions by making differences explicit.
Who should listen: CIOs, CDOs, Heads of Data, and Data Leaders building scalable, compliant data platforms in complex organizations - especially in financial services.
Chapters:
00:00 Intro & context (POA Summit)
03:12 Why banks need strong data governance
07:45 Federation vs. centralization (and pitfalls)
13:10 From 300 owners to 15 domains
19:40 Designing domains that don’t break with reorgs
26:05 Data products vs. datasets—what changed
33:20 Governance by design: policy → product
40:05 Measuring maturity & building momentum
47:30 Risks, success factors, and the next 24 months
🌐 More at https://www.dataminded.com/
#DataGovernance #FederatedGovernance #DataDomains #DataProducts #DataLeadership #BankingData #ABNAMRO #DataStrategy
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