A Secure Connected AWS Cloud Data Lake Powers Innovation and Growth
A next-generation data lake on AWS delivered in four months
Customer analytics completed within 10 seconds
Easy integration with new partners
Challenge
Build a golden source of truth
The German fintech that provides individuals and businesses with unique insight into their creditworthiness. By combining data from multiple sources, the company empowers its customers to optimize their finances and obtain the best deal on loans, utilities and many other services.
As an expanding fintech, it consumes, stores and distributes large volumes of data in diverse formats. Faced with burgeoning volumes of mission-critical complex data, the company needed to establish a “golden source” of trusted data to drive further innovation and provide the business with a secure, real-time data backbone.
Although the brief was broad, the fintech knew that it needed a specialist partner to build a strategic solution that could be used to deliver near real-time data for use in a range of applications for different purposes. Key considerations included data timeliness, accuracy, and security.
When our client put his work out to tender it was soon clear that GFT has the business skills, technical know-how and service culture to deliver a successful project on time and to budget. In practice our two companies complement each other perfectly.
Engagement
A specialist partner for the journey
Following a competitive tender, GFT was chosen as the technical partner for this strategic project. With a successful proven track record of delivering successful data projects on AWS cloud, GFT proposed building a multipurpose “data lake” to transform the fintech company into a state-of-the-art data driven company.
Initially a GFT team of six data engineers worked closely with the fintech's data scientists to design and develop a functional minimum viable product (MVP) data lake that offered:
- Secure, real-time data consumption from internal and external sources
- Advanced real-time and batch analytics, user attributes calculations and secure connectivity to external partners
- ‘Gold quality’ data is exposed through intuitive endpoints for use in business intelligence tool
- Easy integration with new partners
To accelerate progress, maximise flexibility and maintain AWS security standards, GFT adopted managed services wherever possible. An agile approach meant that an MVP was delivered within four months. To maintain momentum GFT delivered the project in functional modules.
GFT’s approach was firmly rooted in practical reality. The project was delivered in modules to accelerate delivery and facilitate flexibility. New technology and features could be reviewed as we progressed, so everyone shared the same objectives.
Benefit
A secure connected AWS cloud data lake
The innovative fintech is constantly evaluating new ideas, so business agility and flexibility are critical to success. With a flexible data architecture, the fintech can build and test new business propositions quickly and at minimal cost.
GFT has designed and delivered a strategic AWS data technology infrastructure that has transformed how the company manages innovation and delivers new services. The new platform embraces the latest AWS security standards and has full multi-tenancy capabilities.
Fintech can acquire new customers, confident in the knowledge that every client enjoys secure access and all data is encrypted while in transit and at rest. The development has been constantly aligned with Databricks and AWS best practices and serves as a model of modern methods and technologies. The data lake can be scaled on demand and in line with business success.
GFT has supported its client for over three years and the partners continue to collaborate on the next phase of the project.
