Imagine you are architecting a distributed computing platform for a financial institution that processes vast volumes of transactional data in real$-$time. The platform must guarantee high availability, reliability, and data integrity while efficiently handling bulk data transfers for replication across geographically dispersed data centers. Discuss your approach to implementing redundancy mechanisms, such as data redundancy and node redundancy, to minimize the risk of data loss and system downtime. Explain how you would employ failure handling strategies, including checkpointing and automatic recovery, to ensure seamless operation in the event of node failures or network partitions. Additionally, analyze the effectiveness of using bulk data transfer techniques, such as parallel streaming and data partitioning, to optimize replication performance and minimize replication latency across distributed nodes.