How do you turn governance from a bottleneck into a business accelerator - in a bank?

In this episode of The Data Playbook, host Kris Peeters talks with Jan Mark Pleijsant, Senior Data Strategy & Governance Advisor at ABN AMRO Bank, about their move from 300+ dispersed data owners to 15 clear, business-aligned data domains and what it took to make federated governance work in a highly regulated environment.

You’ll learn:

• Why “governance police” fails and how a federated model balances autonomy with oversight.
• How ABN AMRO defined domains by the nature of data (customer, loans, payments) rather than shifting business units driving stability across reorganisations.
• What “governance by design” looks like in practice (policies, standards, data lineage, quality, clear ownership).
• The evolution from golden (source-aligned) datasets to consumer-ready data products (“pre-packaged salads”) that speed time-to-insight.
• Why executive sponsorship, domain maturity, and delivery discipline are the real success factors.
• How to measure domain maturity, prioritize critical reports (e.g., regulatory & exec dashboards), and avoid endless debates over definitions by making differences explicit.

Who should listen: CIOs, CDOs, Heads of Data, and Data Leaders building scalable, compliant data platforms in complex organizations - especially in financial services.

Chapters:

00:00 Intro & context (POA Summit)

03:12 Why banks need strong data governance

07:45 Federation vs. centralization (and pitfalls)

13:10 From 300 owners to 15 domains

19:40 Designing domains that don’t break with reorgs

26:05 Data products vs. datasets—what changed

33:20 Governance by design: policy → product

40:05 Measuring maturity & building momentum

47:30 Risks, success factors, and the next 24 months

🌐 More at https://www.dataminded.com/

#DataGovernance #FederatedGovernance #DataDomains #DataProducts #DataLeadership #BankingData #ABNAMRO #DataStrategy