What sounds like a very banal statement accompanied us for a whole two days last week at the 9th Annual Conference Finance and Data Architecture in Mainz. For the approximately 170 delegates from banks and insurance companies from the D-A-CH region, the discussions revolved around specialist data modeling, modern architectures and data quality management.

The keynote speech by Mr. Rhino, CIO of Helaba, already got to the heart of the matter: It's all about the business significance of data. And when you understand your own business and cast it neatly into a business data model, then the problems surrounding ambiguous definitions, inadequate business rules and unreliable key figures can also be solved. Because then a transfer is a transfer - is a transfer.

The discussions about the architecture of data platforms were strongly influenced by the new data mesh approach. A colorful bouquet of opinions and open questions could be observed. Is data mesh really the solution to the cooperation problems between business and IT? On the business side, the assumption is that it is completely technology-agnostic and that IT believes it will be able to be domain-agnostic in the future and thus need less "expertise". In any case, there is agreement on the question of dedicated responsibilities for data and the provision of self-service offerings. To sum up: it was a great conference with very high-caliber speakers who actually discussed the topics of the future. The solution approaches presented give hope for good data projects and a paradigm shift in the handling of data in the company.