BAKU, Azerbaijan, June 9. The Central Bank of Azerbaijan (CBA) will switch to the "Data Lakehouse" system by the end of this year, Head of Data Department, Data Engineering Division at CBA, Mahir Guluzade, said during the 10th International Finance and Banking Summit taking place in Baku, Trend reports.
"As the Central Bank, we have projects to transition to the 'Data Lakehouse' system and Data Governance by 2026. Currently, very serious work is being carried out in this direction," he explained.
Guluzade touched on the importance of data management for the success of artificial intelligence (AI) projects in the corporate environment.
He noted that currently, many artificial intelligence products and corporate solutions cannot be integrated into a real work environment (production). According to him, the main challenge here is the lack of a fully ready data infrastructure for AI-ready data.
"Many believe that if an organization has a data warehouse or a data lake, then it's already possible to start implementing artificial intelligence. However, it is imperative that there is a special layer that ensures that the data to be used here also has meaning for AI and is correctly interpreted by the system. Just as there is a semantic layer in analytical data, the establishment of a 'semantic context layer' is an essential condition here," the official said.
Speaking about the current situation in the financial sector, the head of the department said that although structured data predominates in this field, unstructured data also exists. Modern solutions, such as "Data Lakehouse," should be used to collect all this data in a single center.
Strong Data Governance is a key condition
Emphasizing that the most fundamental element for the successful application of artificial intelligence is strong data governance, Guluzade pointed out that this system allows AI to understand the essence of existing data.
"Data Lineage and Quality data governance refers not only to general rules, but also to the traceability of the source of data (lineage) and quality (quality), which is of critical importance for AI. Ontologies and Knowledge Graphs: One of the biggest challenges is the development of special ontologies and the construction of Knowledge Graphs that can use the 'Graph RAG' (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) technology," he pointed out.
Goals and Strategy of the CBA
Speaking about the current projects of the CBA in this direction, Guluzade also announced the bank's digital transition plans.
"As the Central Bank, we have projects to transition to the 'Data Lakehouse' system and Data Governance by 2026. Currently, very serious work is being done in this direction. We believe that even though it is the last year of our strategy, we will fully achieve the goals set. Building an artificial intelligence layer, i.e., ML-Ops (Machine Learning Operations) system on top of this infrastructure is one of our main priorities, and our relevant strategy is already ready," he added.
