The high level of data and data product use-case customisation among financial institutions offers an insight into the challenges that technology teams face in managing their organisations’ data.
Observability has become more difficult as each data user tailors their tech provisions to their own business needs and data provisioning must be similarly responsive at a time when the volumes of information ingested by organisations have turned from a flow to a gush.Add into the mix the increasingly complex characteristics of data – think real-time and unstructured – as well as the quality requirements of artificial intelligence-based applications and it’s easy to see how some organisations are struggling to harness the full value of their data ecosystems.
Into this environment has entered 3forge, a New York-based application engine provider, with its 3forge Enterprise product, which is designed to ease the governance challenges of the increasingly complex data needs of institutions. The new innovation is a data fabric built specifically for financial institutions that brings together real-time data, business logic, AI and application development to 3forge’s platform.
“What we’re finding from our customers is that… there is now suddenly this lack of governance over how things are tested and around how things are being built, how things are connected,” 3forge founder and chief executive Robert Cooke told Data Management Insight.
Three Layers
The 3forge Enterprise product provides three layers of data management solutions: a governed pipeline for real-time financial data; an application engine; and an AI-assisted development layer for building and running financial workflows.
“Together, these layers allow vendor platforms, internal systems and AI-enabled applications to access real-time and historical data through unified queries, streams, APIs, and agent access, while preserving the entitlements, auditability, and production controls required for capital markets,” the company said.
3forge has stepped into the workflow streamlining space after establishing itself as a provider of real-time data solutions for leading banks and financial institutions. Its application fabric for finance is built to unify often fragmented data and tech estates as well as build AI-powered applications.
“We’re unique in that we have very good partnerships with the top five tier-one banks in the world,” Cooks said. “And so we have direct access to what the most sophisticated architects and technologists are facing and the problems that they’re looking at.”
Dashboard Expansion
The company founder said 3forge Enterprise brings simplicity to data managers who are being expected to process and provide data to end users in an environment of mushrooming use cases.
“They are more nuanced; we have more and more unique types of dashboards… the general trend of technology is to provide people with a more unique and customised experience for the individual based on what they do,” he said. “If everyone is using the same application… it’s very doable to predict how much data you need, how they’re going to log in, what they’re going to be doing, what kind of queries they’re going to be running, what an outage means, and so on.
“Now start to move to a world where you have instead of 10,000 people on one application, you instead have 10,000 people on 10,000 applications.”
By creating a fabric layer, individual users can interact uniquely with data, decisions, AI and applications on a common platform, with governance guardrails in place overseeing privacy and security.
Cooke uses the analogy of a lift to explain the dilemma of data chiefs that its product seeks to solve.
While everybody uses lifts, few know exactly how they are built and what makes them work. For travellers going between floors in a high-rise, this is not a problem; but to extend the analogy to users of data products and software in an age of self-build and AI-assisted creation, it is a different matter.
“Behind the scenes, there’s a ton of observability and there are a ton of access points where you can control things – safety measures and all of these things that go into building a robust system,” he explained.
“So how do you allow people to quickly build that elevator, but at the same time provide that sense of security that you need when you’re dealing with, well, maybe not people’s lives, but people’s money?”
New Capabilities
3forge said its Enterprise product has five key capabilities:
- Provides unified, current-state access to real-time and historical tables, streams and procedures across data nodes in the 3forge fabric.
- Enables developers and applications to publish, subscribe, query and insert data through native connectivity.
- Provides Model Context Protocol (MCP)-compatible agents and AI environments with controlled access to 3forge-managed enterprise data.
- Enables users and developers to create financial applications, workflows and analytics with AI assistance.
- Centralises the management of 3forge deployments, including health monitoring, alert generation, reporting, instrumentation, distributed licensing, secure API/admin connectivity and containerisation support for the dynamic operation of 3forge components.
3forge Enterprise is fully accessible to clients already, with its launch hastened by demand from leading banks, according to Cooke. Future iterations are expected to include circuit breakers to reduce the risk of data and query overload, and agentic assistance is also in the making.
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