“Think of Confluent as a Swiss Army knife - it can do so many things in terms of data processing. We want to reduce the latency and increase data availability as much as we can, and we know we can scale even further with Confluent.”
Adityo August
Data Engineering and Analytics Lead, Kredivo
Founded in 2015, Kredivo Group (formerly known as FinAccel) is a leading provider of digital financial services in Southeast Asia.
The group's flagship product, Kredivo, offers a Buy Now Pay Later credit facility for consumers based on real-time decisions, enabling consumers to apply and qualify for instant credit financing for e-commerce and online purchases as well as personal loans. The company's mission is to become the digital financial services platform for tens of millions of consumers in Southeast Asia.
By leveraging Confluent Cloud as part of a microservice architecture, Kredivo has revolutionized its data management strategy. The automation in gauging potential customers’ creditworthiness empowers Kredivo to transform the financial landscape in Southeast Asia, while maintaining bank-like risk metrics and a capital-efficient business model.
Technical Challenge and Solution
Kredivo had been self-managing Apache Kafka®, using it to stream customer and loan application data between source databases and their data lake. While their Kafka implementation was powering their analytics and data warehouse use cases, the team was encountering a number of issues as they began to scale.
The effort and cost required to self-manage Kafka was significant, meaning that the development team was unable to invest in other projects. As the business grew, moreover, Kredivo found it difficult to scale their Kafka implementation to meet demand, especially at the low latencies they needed.
“When I started day one, we already had the analytics platform, but not in a centralized way or a structured manner,” said Adityo August, senior lead of data engineering and analytics at Kredivo. “Also, we were seeing that as the business grew, data latency was becoming more of an issue. It was beginning to be too troublesome to manage and difficult to create new pipelines into the platform.”
Kredivo recognised the time-critical need to find a partner to simplify its complex data architecture without sacrificing performance.
“We liked what Kafka could do and the concept of connectors but we would have needed a dedicated infrastructure team to set up and manage everything, which we didn’t have. So that’s why Confluent came into the picture,” said August.
Making data easily manageable with Confluent Cloud
Confluent provides a centralized platform for data streaming, without having to overhaul the existing cloud strategy. This was important to Kredivo, as they didn’t have the time or resources for such a large transformation.
Working closely with August’s team, the Confluent concierge team identified the issues and provided technical and commercial solutions to optimize Kafka for Kredivo’s tailored use.
Being cloud agnostic, they were able to make the change from AWS to GCP, streaming all their databases into BigQuery through the sink connector. Additional features which addressed security and disaster recovery, were also influencing factors.
As a result of more development time, the engineering and production teams are able to focus on more value add use cases, such as:
Simplifying alerts for fraud and payment errors
Kredivo uses its analytics platform to run alerts whenever data deviates from usual user behavioral data for payment transactions. This is done through results from data streaming tables which allows for running alerts using resource-intensive queries and aggregated logic, enabling the production system to monitor in real time.
Marketing campaign tracking
One of the biggest impacts has been powering comprehensive marketing campaign tracking with Confluent. This helps them analyze campaign spending in various channels and measure the effectiveness of their marketing efforts in their data warehouses and marketing dashboards.
Business Results
Kredivo initially engaged Confluent in order to reduce the burden of self-managing Apache Kafka. While they achieved this, their partnership with Confluent has resulted in more significant developments, with data streaming helping to power the success of the company.
Simplification of data streaming flows enabled faster development time. Confluent is speeding up processes, enabling faster development time, reduced maintenance and accelerated product delivery.
August shared that the Confluent ecosystem has simplified data streaming for them by making management and monitoring much easier. This helps them build new pipelines much faster and on a daily basis, he added.
Cost savings to infrastructure with a managed, cloud-based streaming platform: By providing a productized platform that leverages Kafka, Confluent solved Kredivo’s need to hire and train an infrastructure team, solely dedicated to platform management. “We have what we like, which is the concept of Kafka’s streaming connector, but it also lifts up our burden of operations,” August said.
With Confluent, Kredivo has reduced their cost for data streaming infrastructure for its analytics and data warehouse use cases by 40%.
Alerts for fraud and payment errors: Faster detection for fraud and production issues after using Confluent, driving more business value. This result is mainly due to faster data availability which means several of our issues and fraud can be detected much faster than before.
Other company departments are benefiting: Confluent has helped simplify access to real-time data for other teams such as marketing, finance, and risk management—so they are able to easily subscribe to the data products they need.
Future for Kredivo
As its business expands, Kredivo sees Confluent as a scalable and promising solution for data streaming—and a key enabler when it comes to enhancing its analytics and data warehouse use cases.
“Think of Confluent as a Swiss Army knife—it can do so many things in terms of data processing,” August said. “We want to reduce the latency and increase data availability as much as we can, and we know we can scale even further with Confluent.”
Powered by Confluent Cloud, data streaming is now a foundational part of achieving their mission of becoming the digital financial services platform of choice for tens of millions of consumers in Southeast Asia.
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