“Any CTO would want their infrastructure to be multi-cloud and able to support multiple clients. Confluent’s ability to manage all that, while streaming data across platforms and technologies, has been key to our success in bringing our data together.”
Shujahat Bashir
Director of Software Engineering, Thrivent
How Thrivent Uses Real-Time Data for AI-Driven Fraud Detection
Thrivent, a financial services company that specializes in delivering custom solutions for banking, investments, and insurance to over 2.3 million clients, has over a century of experience helping people make purposeful financial decisions that meet their unique needs. Recently, Thrivent set out on a mission to modernize its data infrastructure to meet the fast-paced expectations of its customers.
According to Shujahat Bashir, Director of Software Engineering at Thrivent, “Today’s customers have a shorter attention span than ever.” As a result, the company had to find a way to leverage its data to deliver immediate, real-time insights to users—ultimately helping both customers and advisors make smart investment decisions as quickly as possible. But with data scattered across legacy systems and multi-cloud databases, the challenge of integrating data was daunting.
By turning to Confluent, Thrivent found the solution it needed to unify its data and enable real-time decision-making at scale.
Technical Solution
One of Thrivent’s biggest technical hurdles was overcoming decades of data silos that prevented the company from building a unified customer profile.
To address this challenge, Bashir knew that the right data streaming platform solution had to prioritize features like data schemas, disaster recovery, and robust professional services support.
With Confluent features like Kafka Connect and Kafka Streams, Thrivent was able to seamlessly capture, process, and route data from disconnected systems into a centralized hub. Confluent’s Schema Registry ensured that data was consistently structured, allowing the team to integrate different data sources and get a real-time, up-to-date view of each customer’s financial journey.
The time and money saved from Confluent’s integrated workflow automation and built-in rules was significant. “One of the most impactful real-time use cases Confluent has enabled for us is our recent integration with Datadog,” said Bashir. “We were able to connect our Kafka monitoring with Datadog in 15 minutes using Confluent Connectors. If you put a dollar value on how much time this has saved our engineers, we're looking at a cost savings of half a million to one million dollars.”
With Confluent’s fully managed data streaming platform handling the company's real-time infrastructure, Bashir’s team could focus on delivering better services and features for customers, including AI and machine learning-driven insights. These AI/ML models enabled Thrivent to better predict fraudulent transactions and safeguard customer assets more effectively.
Security and compliance, of course, were critical, given the highly regulated nature of the financial services industry. Confluent’s built-in governance tools ensured that Thrivent adhered to strict financial regulations without having to build an extensive compliance framework from scratch. Additionally, Confluent’s ability to support multi-cloud environments and integrate with a diverse array of technologies provided the flexibility to scale as both Thrivent’s infrastructure and client base grew.
Business Results
Using Confluent Cloud, Thrivent streams, processes, and governs data across its cloud infrastructure and third-party financial systems into a central hub enabling advisors to give tailored and intelligent financial advice to its members based on real-time market and portfolio data.
The immediate impact of adopting Confluent was clear: improved data visibility and a breakdown of long-standing silos. This enhanced data access allowed Thrivent to deliver more personalized services and marketing, while support for real-time machine learning capabilities (specifically, predictive insights and built-in intelligence), empowered Thrivent’s advisors to offer smarter, more tailored financial advice to clients.
Confluent also strengthened Thrivent’s fraud detection capabilities. By fueling machine learning models with real-time streaming data, Confluent’s data streaming platform allowed Thrivent to monitor and prevent fraudulent enabled Thrivent to better predict fraudulent transactions instantly. As Bashir explained, “One of the primary reasons Thrivent chose Confluent was for its security, compliance, and regulatory features—especially in the financial services and fintech industries, where those are just ongoing challenges we have to address.”
With streamlined data governance and security processes via Confluent, Thrivent is now able to maintain compliance without the need for costly custom solutions. In the financial services industry, AI and machine learning play a crucial role in automated trading. AI-driven robotic trading uses real-time data to predict stock prices and market sentiment, with machines making informed trades on behalf of clients. Confluent has played a key role in providing Thrivent with the audit trails and transaction reconciliation necessary to ensure smooth, balanced transaction flows across all systems and applications.
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