Banco Bradesco, one of the largest financial institutions in Brazil, is advancing its open finance strategy by making customer-consented data more accessible and actionable. As demand for faster insights across credit, investments, CRM and competitive benchmarking grew, its data engineering team faced a surge of complex, time-consuming requests. With Genie on the Databricks Platform, Banco Bradesco enables business analysts to explore trusted data in plain language and turn hours or weeks of manual work into real-time answers that drive faster, more personalized financial decisions.
When open finance insights required manual requests and long wait times
As Brazil’s open finance ecosystem expands, Banco Bradesco is working to unlock the full value of customer-consented data. By securely accessing financial information across institutions, the bank can better understand customer behavior, benchmark against competitors and deliver more personalized products. Today, 4M+ customers share data across banks and Bradesco — creating a strong opportunity to unlock new business through combined data insights.
But turning that data into usable insights was not simple. Business analysts relied heavily on the data engineering team to answer even straightforward questions, from comparing credit card usage across institutions to identifying where customers held investments outside the bank. Each request required time, coordination and technical expertise.
“We had to go through managers, prioritize requests and assign someone to build the analysis,” said Marcelo Dozzi Barbugli, Data Engineering Team, Open Finance, Banco Bradesco. “It could take hours or even weeks, depending on the complexity.”
“Some business areas lack the expertise to work in an analytical environment, leading to longer data exploration cycles and a limited ability to generate descriptive insights and trends,” said Augusto Vieira, Sr. Manager Open Finance, Banco Bradesco.
The process created bottlenecks. Requests were routed through sprint cycles, requiring back-and-forth clarification and manual query development. Even simple questions slowed decision-making and limited how quickly teams could act on opportunities in a competitive market.
Genie brings self-service data access to open finance teams
To remove those bottlenecks, Banco Bradesco introduced Genie, enabling business users to query data directly using natural language. Instead of relying on engineers, analysts can now explore datasets independently and get answers in seconds.
“The idea was to let users interact with the data without needing to come to us,” Marcelo explained.
Built on top of Databricks and governed through Unity Catalog, Genie spaces are configured with curated tables, business rules and joins that reflect the bank’s open finance data model. This ensures responses are accurate and aligned with the business's definition of key metrics.
“We identified that the primary challenge was not data availability, but the difficulty in identifying the right data and fields for analysis. Genie enables a simpler and more intuitive way to explore data,” said Augusto.
From a development standpoint, the team found Genie straightforward to implement. “You define the instructions, add the tables and include the business logic,” Marcelo said. “Compared to other tools, it’s very simple to set up.”
For users, the experience is intuitive. Analysts interact with Genie much like a conversational AI tool and receive answers as text, tables or visualizations. More advanced users can inspect the generated SQL and extend analyses further in notebooks.
To maintain trust in the outputs, the team actively monitors usage and refines the semantic layer. “We review the questions, validate the queries and adjust based on how users actually ask things,” Marcelo said. “That helps us improve accuracy and make the experience more reliable over time.”
From hours to seconds, accelerating decisions and competitive advantage
The impact has been immediate and measurable. Genie has reduced the time required to answer data questions by more than 95%, eliminating the need for manual intervention in most cases.
In its first month alone, the platform handled nearly 2.5K+ questions from business users, significantly reducing the workload on the data engineering team and freeing them to focus on higher-value work.
At the same time, adoption is growing quickly. The number of Genie users has expanded from a small group of early testers to more than 115+ active users, with continued growth expected as additional data domains come online.
“We can enable business teams to independently leverage data and develop end-to-end strategies, while the Open Finance team focuses on advancing data capabilities,” Augusto shares.
Beyond efficiency gains, the biggest impact is on business outcomes. With faster access to insights, teams can act more quickly on open finance data, identifying opportunities to offer better credit terms, tailor investment products and compete more effectively for customers.
“They can now make personalized offers much faster,” Marcelo said. “We can target the right clients with the right products based on real data in real time.”
As Banco Bradesco expands Genie across more use cases, the platform is becoming a critical layer in its data strategy, bridging the gap between complex data systems and the business decisions that depend on them.