Marc Rind is the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for Data at Fiserv. Completing an MA in Business Communications from Emerson College, his entry into the working world aligned with the internet boom of the mid-1990s, when Marc held a deep interest in what the internet could do for public relations.
“This was all brand new when I was studying at Emerson College, and it set me on a path in the field of technology and software development,” he says.
Data was a particular point of interest for Marc, which saw him work for a series of DotCom startups before joining Automatic Data Processing (ADP), where he stayed for 16 years.
“I helped build ADP’s data cloud,” says Marc, “pulling data from across its systems into a common location for the 600,000 businesses to which they provided HR and payroll capabilities.
“Not only did this help serve data and analytics aims for ADP’s products, but helped generate actionable insights from across the company’s massive data sets, to provide things like ADP’s National Employment report.”
Then in 2020, Rind moved to Fiserv, the fintech that combines data from over 1,800 financial institutions for everything from for core processing to providing cards and payment solutions, all the way down to merchant acquiring and card issuing.
“Fiserv’s position means it has some of the most unique and fascinating financial data in the world,” says Marc.
Since joining Fiserv, he has been working towards building something similar to ADP’s data cloud, by pulling Fiserv’s data into a common enterprise-grade ecosystem.
The aim? To serve the various product needs for each of Fiserv’s business units, helping it better serve client needs and positioning it to connect data from across the organisation and deliver actionable insights for customers – insights they would not be able to get anywhere else in the world.
Fiserv’s four-year journey to cloud migration
‘Marc, what technology stack should we be looking at going forward, from a data perspective?’ This was one of the first questions Fiserv’s CTO of Data was asked when he joined four and a half years ago.
Of course, no decision process is easy, and each organisation has its own idiosyncrasies that must be considered, but it became clear to Marc that Fiserv needed to move to the cloud.
Fiserv operates scalable compute, elastic compute and various other data science workloads. “When you have workloads like this, you see a lot of spikes and reductions,” says Marc.
“So, to better manage data functions, we wanted to move these services into the cloud.”
What’s more, Fiserv operates multiple business units, as mentioned above – meaning historically its data sources have been siloed in these different units. “Each of these data sets has their own purpose, and their own clients that they're serving,” continues Marc.
“We wanted to have something that we could federate development on top of without disturbing data owners within our individual units – because data owners know their data best.
“It was important to work with these individual units so they could build into this cloud platform, so they knew that their data wouldn’t be affected, but it could be used for more value-added purposes organisation-wide.”
Read the full story HERE.
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