Capitec, South Africa’s largest digital bank, is taking a hybrid approach that combines digital banking with traditional branches. They serve nearly 16 million customers and support over 840 branches nationwide. While this hybrid approach enables Capitec to effectively reach a unique local customer base made up of both more and less technologically- inclined customers, it creates a complex data landscape that adds to the challenge of regulatory compliance.

Capitec needs to be able to trust its data to ensure that strategic business decisions are based on accurate, verifiable insights. MANTA offered the toolsets Capitec required to deliver on these requirements in the short term and add business value in the medium to long term.

Data Lineage to Understand Data Changes

As a bank, Capitec operates within a heavily regulated environment with numerous laws governing the way data is obtained, processed, and retained. Data lineage is essential to deliver Capitec’s modern financial services as, without it, they had limited visibility of their data. It is beneficial not only for compliance purposes but also for understanding the impact of data changes on both upstream and downstream dependencies. Without data lineage, Capitec cannot effectively understand and manage the risks of data changes. Changes that result in data quality issues and inaccurate reporting could have a significant financial and regulatory impact and must be automatically tracked.

To address data governance and data lineage requirements, Capitec turned to MANTA, implemented by a South African partner, Master Data Management (Pty) Ltd.

The Solution

For Capitec, simplicity is the ultimate sophistication, and using innovative technology to enhance what they offer is a key differentiator. MANTA’s unified lineage automatically maps all information flows to give Capitec a complete overview of their data pipelines. This boosts governance efforts, accelerates new development, shortens time to market, and speeds up their IT modernization process. MANTA enables Capitec to vastly simplify their data landscape and, in turn, better serve their customers. Additionally, it supports compliance efforts, providing them with the required visibility into their data landscape and helping them meet their RDARR commitments for the regulator.

“Capitec is focused on our clients, and serving them is core to our operations, but our hybrid approach of digital and traditional banking adds complexity to our data landscape. There are multiple channels for data to enter our business, each with its own back-end systems. We needed a data governance solution to help us manage the risk around this and effectively organize our data to enable it to be used for business insight,” says Manrich Kotze, Lead Data Governance Analyst, Digital & Data Solutions at Capitec.

MANTA Fosters a Data Culture through Enhanced Visualization

“Managing data is not the biggest challenge anymore; it is our data pipelines, plumbing for data, that have become a major issue for data- driven businesses. The rate of change in data is extreme as we innovate and experiment every day, and the complexity of data infrastructure is skyrocketing. Capitec Bank did an amazing job recognizing that issue soon enough and facing it with MANTA’s lineage platform.” says Tomas Kratky, MANTA’s CEO.

MANTA delivers enhanced data visibility to Capitec’s data governance platform, enabling Capitec to link stewardship and ownership to data, visualize the data, and understand how it flows through the organization. Impact assessments are a critical component to mitigate the risks and minimize the negative effects of data changes. MANTA also supports the governance of data as an enterprise asset facilitating a data-driven organization. This, in turn, supports decision-making based on accurate data insight and fosters a data culture within Capitec.

“The complexity of the data landscape at Capitec, along with the need for business to be able to engage with the solution and maintain it, made MANTA well suited for their needs. After we performed a proof of concept, this fit was clear. Master Data Management provided a mixture of onsite and remote support as well as the technical expertise and skills transfer to ensure a seamless implementation,” says Gary Allemann, Managing Director at Master Data Management.

About the Project

“The project began in October 2019 and was finished by the end of December of the same year. It was a quick, easy implementation that was up and running swiftly and with minimal business impact. Thanks to the superior technology delivered by MANTA, our data lineage and governance toolset was fully operational within just three months,” Kotze adds.

MANTA’s unified lineage platform provides connectors and lineage for most databases, modeling tools, reporting tools, ETL platforms, and common programming languages. This allows Capitec to easily extend lineage to new use cases using different technology platforms, for example, to rapidly extend lineage to the business banking landscape following Capitec’s acquisition of Mercantile Bank.

MANTA is also supporting Capitec’s efforts to untangle the on-premises data landscape and facilitate their shift to the cloud.

Capitec’s investment in MANTA has allowed them to visualize their entire data landscape as never before. This ability to rapidly assess the impact of planned changes in their data environment has helped Capitec boost business agility and optimize data processing.