Technology
HSBC improves data access and operational efficiency with Starburst technology.
Published by Jessica Weisman-Pitts
Posted on December 5, 2024
6 min readLast updated: January 28, 2026
Global Banking and Finance Review
Company
Published by Jessica Weisman-Pitts
Posted on December 5, 2024
6 min readLast updated: January 28, 2026
Thanks to Starburst’s solution, HSBC has accelerated its access to information with queries up to 20 times faster, reducing analysis time from several hours to just a few minutes.
Thanks to Starburst’s solution, HSBC has accelerated its access to information with queries up to 20 times faster, reducing analysis time from several hours to just a few minutes.
Boston, MA, 4 December 2024 – Starburst, the Trino Company, is pleased to have its data lakehouse selected by HSBC, one of the world’s largest banking and financial services organizations, to support how the bank accesses and gains value from its large-scale analytical data stores. By relying on Starburst for its data lakehouse, HSBC is making data that’s globally dispersed across heterogeneous sources instantly accessible, while ensuring enhanced compliance and significantly reducing operational costs.
Starburst’s technology has ensured that HSBC now benefits from a data platform capability that enables safe data access,in an agile way that complies with local and international regulations. This integration optimises banking operations and reduces the complexity of compliance processes, while enabling HSBC to leverage its real-time data to anticipate customer needs and strengthen its competitiveness in international markets.
The scalable data lakehouse technology developed by Starburst is an integral part of HSBCs’ hybrid data platform. It enables HSBC to drastically reduce data transfers and duplication, resulting in significant gains in operational efficiency and cost reduction. Starburst also provides unified access to data while respecting local data sovereignty regulations, strengthening HSBC’s data governance.
Starburst’s solution has allowed HSBC to enhance its access to information residing in separate silos bypassing traditional data engineering delays and enabling queries to be executed up to 20 times faster, reducing analysis time from several hours to just a few minutes. In addition, by integrating data from a variety of sources while maintaining rigorous access and masking controls, Starburst’s technology is helping HSBC to strengthen its approach to governance and compliance.
“The data virtualisation capability powered by Starburst’s data lake house delivers significant benefits to our organisation and our customers,” said Kai Yang, CIO, Group Data Technology at HSBC. “It gives our teams the agility and scalability to integrate new data sources quickly and securely. This allows us to leverage data as a true strategic asset to improve decision-making and long-term customer outcomes.”
With this innovative use of data supported by Starburst technology, HSBC also earned the Hong Kong Business Technology Excellence Award in the Virtualisation – Banking category, a recognition that underlines HSBC’s commitment to improving decision-making processes through the use of AI and data management.
For more information on this recognition, see the full list of winners in the Technology Excellence Awards 2024 programme.
Starburst: Media Talking Points
Starburst as a compelling narrative in several ways:
It’s highly disruptive to a large market that has often failed to meet its promise
It’s simply ‘a better mousetrap’ for a data lake sector worth well over $10bn per annum and for decades has been plagued by complexity, high costs, glacial slowness and closed systems that make customers long-term captives of ageing technologies.
It offers a significant business technology advantage for customers based on advantages of minimal complexity, low cost and flexible architecture with massive performance and scale advantages over data lake incumbents. The ancient promise of being able to quickly query data wherever it resides and regardless of platform is finally being fulfilled.
It’s a ‘hot’ company following a unique path
Despite being just six years old, Starburst is valued at almost $3.4bn and in one funding round alone in 2022 it raised $250m. This is despite the company having bootstrapped its foundations and focused on profitable growth rather than some long-term pot of gold at the end of a rainbow following years of punishing losses. Having raised plenty of money, Starburst can now focus on executing by investing in R&D, hiring and market coverage.
It’s really, really open
Most disruptors focus on displacing leaders but Starburst can peacefully coexist with incumbents such as DataBricks and Snowflake. Organisations that have made major investments in companies such as these do not have to ‘rip and replace’ and can take their own time to adapt their data stacks. Starburst is based on open source software and can easily slot in alongside other technologies both on premises or in the cloud via its Galaxy SaaS offering. And if customers decide in future that Starburst is not for them they can easily replace it with another engine. There is no attempt to lock in customers or guide them to proprietary dead ends.
It has a *very* long reach
Starburst can rapidly connect and query data outside the perimeters of the data lake so there is an immediate 75 per cent cost saving (and major time saving) on the mammoth task of bringing data inside lakes. That means projects start fast, time isn’t squandered on justifying upfront outlays and near-term opportunities can be grasped now with data scientists and non-specialists able to explore possibilities. That includes data ripe to be trained for AI models, set to be a generational shift in how we capture and use data.
It takes away fear of change
For CIOs and CTOs that have made ‘bet the farm’ decisions on incumbents, Starburst can be a complementary force that helps to address knotty challenges and to dismiss fear of change without embarrassing and disruptive strategic U-turns being required. It is the Switzerland of data management and it plays nice with rival vendors, new technologies and the need to run complex IT operations.
It has friends in high places
Starburst is backed by stellar investment marques including Index Ventures, Salesforce Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz and it has a blue-chip go-to-market partner in Dell, which built its Data Lakehouse appliance on Starburst technology.
About Starburst
Starburst, the Open Hybrid Lakehouse, is the leading end-to-end data platform to securely access, analyze, and share data for analytics and AI across hybrid, on-premises, and multi-cloud environments. As the leaders in Trino, a modern open-source SQL engine, Starburst empowers the most data-intensive and security-conscious organizations like Comcast, Halliburton, Vectra, EMIS Health, and 7 of the top 10 global banks to democratize data access, enhance analytics performance, and improve architecture optionality. With the Open Hybrid Lakehouse from Starburst, enterprises globally can easily discover and use all their relevant business data to power new applications and analytics across risk mitigation, supply chain, customer experiences, product optimization, streaming, and more.
Data virtualization is a technology that allows users to access and manipulate data without needing to know its physical location or format, enabling faster data retrieval and analysis.
A data lakehouse is a unified data platform that combines elements of data lakes and data warehouses, allowing for efficient storage and processing of large volumes of data.
Compliance in banking refers to the adherence to laws, regulations, and guidelines that govern financial institutions, ensuring they operate within legal frameworks and maintain ethical standards.
Operational efficiency is the ability of an organization to deliver products or services in the most cost-effective manner without compromising quality, often achieved through process optimization.
Data governance is the management of data availability, usability, integrity, and security in an organization, ensuring that data is accurate and used responsibly.
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