Aker enables strategic data and cloud modernisation for financial services leader

The Client

Hargreaves Lansdown is one of the UK’s largest retail investment platform, serving over 2 million clients and managing assets exceeding £172 billion. The organisation provides a comprehensive suite of investment accounts, products and research tools - operating in a highly regulated financial services environment requiring continuous balance of client experience, operational efficiency and strict compliance.

To support continued growth and evolving regulatory expectations, Hargreaves Lansdown set out to modernise its data infrastructure: improving the client journey, enhancing operational insight and establishing a cloud-centric foundation capable of supporting long-term strategic transformation.

The Challenge

Hargreaves Lansdown recognised that becoming truly data-driven would be essential to improving client out comes and maintaining market leadership.
‍Key challenges included:

•    Transitioning from a legacy, on-premise technology estate to a cloud-first operating model

•    Executing a structured, risk-managed cloud migration without disrupting critical services

•    Strengthening enterprise data and analytics capabilities to support decision-making at scale

•    Meeting stringent regulatory and compliance obligations throughout transformation

•    Aligning modern data and cloud architecture with enterprise architecture and security standards

The organisation required a partner with proven expertise in strategic cloud and data transformation within mission-critical, regulated industries - capable of providing both technical leadership and practical delivery.

The Solution

Aker was engaged by Hargreaves Lansdown to provide strategic cloud and data strategy and architecture leadership,supporting architectural design and enterprise-wide alignment across technology, risk and governance.
Delivery focused on three core workstreams:

Cloud Migration & Operating Model

Aker defined a comprehensive enterprise cloud migration strategy aligned to HL’s growth ambitions and regulatory responsibilities - designing a scalable cloud operating model,establishing secure landing zone design patterns, and embedding cloud cost-optimisation and risk-managed migration guardrails into architectural governance.

Secure Data Platform Architecture

Aker designed a modern, cloud-native data architecture with security-by-design principles embedded throughout — establishing alignment with the enterprise architecture team, defining cloud-centric data architecture patterns, and creating a Governance, Risk & Compliance (GRC) model suited to a regulated financial services environment.

Governance, Risk & Data Enablement

Aker led the evaluation and onboarding of enterprise data governance technologies, ensuring data quality, lineage, access controls and auditability were foundational. The result: a future-ready architecture enabling advanced analytics, operational insight and improved client experiences - with full regulatory integrity. Aker also supported the creation of repeatable delivery patterns and a modern developer productivity platform capability.

The Technology

A key strategy and architecture outcome was a carefully evaluated, cloud-native technology stack — selected to meet HL’s regulatory obligations, security requirements and long-terms capability ambitions:

•    Cloud Platform - AWS: Multi-account Hardened Cloud Environment across three availability zones. Key services: Amazon EKS,MSK (Kafka), S3, Athena and AWS Glue. Security enforced via IAM, CloudTrail, Guard Duty, Security Hub, KMS and Secrets Manager; secure privileged access via AWS Client VPN and Amazon Workspaces.

•    Data Hub & CDC - AWS + Qlik Replicate / Precisely Connect: Cloud-native streaming (Amazon MSK) and batch data hub,with CDC tooling capturing changes from Oracle RAC, Sybase and MariaDB. Validated via proof-of-concept to confirm source system connectivity across all platforms.

•    Core Data Platform - Snowflake · DBT · KSQL · Apache Airflow (MWAA): Snowflake as the fully managed data warehouse; DBT for SQL-first transformation; AWS Glue and KSQL for stream processing; Apache Airflow (MWAA) for end-to-end workflow orchestration across the full data lifecycle.

•    Data Governance - Precisely Data360: Govern(SaaS), Analyze (AWS EC2) and DQ+ (SaaS) providing automated metadata capture, data quality measurement, lineage, cataloguing and RBAC — foundational to the platform, not retrospective.

•    Reporting & DevOps - Power BI · GitLab · Prometheus ·Grafana: Power BI for enterprise reporting (Snowflake-native, no separate SSAS cubes); GitLab with SAST, DAST and container scanning in CI/CD; Prometheus, Grafana and Jaeger for platform monitoring, metrics and distributed tracing.

The Value

By combining strategic advisory expertise with practical delivery leadership, Aker enabled Hargreaves Lansdown to progress confidently toward a data-driven, cloud-enabled future - strengthening both client experience and regulatory assurance.

•    A modern, cloud-centric data architecture and cloud operating model foundation

•    A fit-for-purpose regulatory compliance framework aligned to financial services standards

•    Clear enterprise alignment across data strategy, cloud adoption and security architecture

•    Reduced transformation risk through structured governance and architectural guardrails

•    Enhanced readiness for advanced analytics via an AI-ready data platform

•    Stronger data integration, quality controls and cyber-resilient cloud systems

 Through its partnership with Aker, Hargreaves Lansdown established strong foundations for long-term data and cloud transformation.‍