Mercury, the Roman god of commerce, is often depicted carrying a purse, symbolic of business transactions, wearing winged sandals, illustrating his abilities to move at great speeds. Transactions power the world’s business systems today, ranging from millions of packages moving worldwide tracked in real time by logistics companies to global payments from personal loans to securities trading to intergovernmental transactions, keeping goods and services flowing worldwide.

In financial services, data is essential for storing product information, capturing customer details, processing transactions and keeping records of accounts; the relationship between products and their underlying data has always been symbiotic. A significant amount of data infrastructure is static, fragmented across data silos or based on legacy platforms. This has created an impedance mismatch between products and the underlying data.

June is the month which holds the summer solstice, and (at least in the northern hemisphere) we enjoy the longest days of sunshine out of the entire year. Just as the sun is making its longest trips across the sky, the BigQuery team is delighted to announce our next set of user-friendly SQL features.

When ATB Financial decided to migrate its vast SAP landscape to the cloud, the primary goal was to focus on things that matter to customers as opposed to IT infrastructure. Based in Alberta, Canada, ATB Financial serves over 800,000 customers through hundreds of branches as well as digital banking options. To keep pace with competition from large banks and FinTech startups and to meet the increasing 24/7 demands of customers, digital transformation was a must.