IAG & Kmart: The Business Impact of Data Streaming in Australia & New Zealand

From large insurance companies to retail giants, businesses across Australia and New Zealand (ANZ) need to process vast amounts of information in real time. During Confluent’s Data in Motion Tour in ANZ, customers like Insurance Australia Group (IAG) and Kmart shared how adopting real-time data streaming drove innovation in their companies—driving new use cases that ensure accurate and efficient backend operations.

Year over year, each company increasingly grappled with the burdens and limitations of outdated IT systems that couldn’t handle massive volumes of data and, in turn, found a scalable solution to stay competitive: Confluent’s cloud-native and complete data streaming platform.

Kmart needed to optimize its omnichannel customer experience across its 350+ stores in ANZ. Handling massive volumes of data required not just any solution, but a platform that enabled real-time stream processing at scale. "We needed to decouple our systems to ensure that data was flowing seamlessly," said Duane Gomes, principal architect of enterprise technology at Kmart. To make sense of vast amounts of data from customers shopping across time zones, the company needed a robust platform capable of stream processing at scale.

As Australia’s largest general insurance provider, IAG also needed to respond quickly to customer requests. Customer data would flow from hundreds of sources—from policy updates to claims submission and more. Today, the company has scaled to handle approximately $14 billion in premiums and has had data streaming as part of its strategy since 2017.

Ready to learn about data streaming from experts in your industry and beyond? Check out recorded sessions from Current 2024.

ANZ businesses unlock data value with streaming processing and governance

In industries like retail, finance, and insurance,  millions of events are generated every day. Confluent’s data streaming platform didn’t just allow these businesses to stream data—it also provided the necessary processing and governance capabilities to securely scale backend processes and omnichannel experiences.

For Kmart specifically, the company’s migration to an event-driven architecture took two years, an effort that was an undeniable game-changer for the company’s data strategy. Today, through its Hamilton Event Streaming Platform—powered by Confluent—Kmart can ingest more than 200 million daily events across 66 connectors, ensuring seamless integration and scalability with more than 22,000 schemas and 18,000 topic partitions. Thanks to Confluent’s Schema Registry and stream processing features, the enterprise platform team can support three core integration capabilities: API management, file transfers, and eventing.

"We needed to decouple our systems to ensure that data was flowing seamlessly," Duane Gomes, principal architect of enterprise technology at Kmart, said. “With Confluent, we now have the ability to process customer interactions, manage inventory, and track supply chain data—all in real time.”

Burak Hoban, executive manager of data platforms at IAG, echoed this experience, saying “Our business relies on accurate, real-time data, and Confluent’s data streaming platform allows us to meet those expectations efficiently.”

At IAG, the complexity of managing Kafka clusters in-house became overwhelming as the company’s data needs grew. Although IAG’s journey with Confluent began without a specific use case, Hoban said, “We knew that we need to do something in this space to remain current and to remain competitive.”

Confluent’s extensive range of connectors helped the company accelerate the adoption of data streaming, while reducing the burden of upgrades, maintenance, and configuration. Hoban in his oversight of data platforms at IAG, he saw how integration with Confluent “lets us focus our resources more on the value add rather than the toil of… trying to clover things together and pull things together.” This enabled them to improve customer service and reduce operational friction.

In all three cases, stream processing and governance were essential for unlocking the full potential of data, allowing businesses to make faster, more informed decisions.

How data streaming enables AI, enhanced security, and compliance

Beyond operational improvements, adopting Confluent’s data streaming platform means that Kmart and IAG are now able to more easily and consistently leverage real-time data for advanced analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) use cases.

At Kmart, the implementation of real-time initiatives has enabled the company to aggregate and process data for AI models. By utilizing Confluent, Kmart’s team can process vast datasets to derive insights on customer behavior and further optimize store operations. Gomes explained that Confluent’s service for Apache Flink® has been used “heavily in our data science team to do all the heavy lifting of data preparations for our AI models.”

IAG, on the other hand, is moving toward real-time data products that will enhance analytics and reporting while also supporting more advanced AI-driven use cases. The company’s goal is to leverage Confluent’s data streaming platform to process policy life cycle events in real time, enabling next-level predictive analytics and even generative AI for customer interactions.

Like many of its peers in retail, Kmart is focused on protecting the integrity of its data, given the increasing importance of customer privacy and trust. By enforcing strict schemas and utilizing Stream Lineage for tracking data flows and changes, Kmart ensures governance and control over its data ecosystem from supply chain to store operations. Kmart’s Sofia Data Platform, for example, has improved its security posture and expanded capabilities of internal enterprise tools thanks to the flexibility and governance provided by Confluent.

Leading data transformation in ANZ with Confluent

Companies like Kmart and IAG are at the forefront of data and business transformation in the ANZ region. With Confluent, these organizations are able to use stream processing and  governance to increase data accessibility, enable consistent security, and maintain compliance.

Altogether, these improvements not only support AI innovation but also allow these organizations to unlock the full potential of their data, driving operational improvements, security, and new opportunities for growth.

Learn how your organization can do the same—check out recorded sessions from Current 2024: The Data Streaming Event and look out for info on how to attend Current Bengaluru in March 2025.