"Confluent Cloud stands out for its focus on security, especially in highly regulated industries such as banking and healthcare."
José Enrique Pérez Fernández
Chief Data Officer, EVO Banco
EVO Banco is a Spanish digital-native bank created in 2012, with a focus on providing an exceptional customer experience through its modern and innovative banking solutions.
EVO Banco offers a range of banking products and services to its customers, including current/checking accounts, savings accounts, debit and credit cards, loans, mortgages, and insurance. But what makes EVO Banco stand out from other banks is its mobile app. The app allows customers to manage their accounts and perform transactions on their smartphones, making banking more convenient and accessible.
Using a real-time data strategy to understand the needs and actions of each customer enables them to provide a genuinely useful service, not limited to just promoting additional financial products and services. This approach has earned them the title of “Europe’s Most Innovative Bank” on two occasions.
The introduction of Apache Kafka® in 2014 at a time when data streaming in Spain was in its infancy has given EVO Banco the head start on digital transformation over other traditional banks, enabling them to stand out in the market.
Among their first use cases was the push/instant notification on mobile devices— something that was not common at the time. For example, when customers made a bank card purchase, they were sent a notification about the transaction. They were also notified of direct debits and transfers, among other services.
Another use case related to revolving payments, allowing customers to defer a card purchase payment (over €40 and if they had available credit) for a chosen number of months, simply by clicking on a notification.
Data infrastructure challenges
With more use cases running in Kafka, “it soon became apparent that there were challenges to the infrastructure and management of production use cases, and to ensure the efficiency and continuity of our services, we needed to find an alternative platform,” said José Enrique Pérez Fernández, Chief Data Officer, EVO Banco.
To address issues around scalability, latency, cost, and maintenance time, EVO Banco selected Confluent Cloud as its data streaming provider, migrating fully by 2019.
Migrating to Confluent Cloud solved the Kafka challenges in several ways:
Elasticity: With Confluent Cloud, EVO Banco can cope with peaks in demand without any problems, as the cluster can grow flexibly. This ensures the ability to provide ongoing service at critical moments.
Stability: Service losses have been significantly minimized since adopting Confluent Cloud solutions, whose platforms and cloud services are designed to guarantee high availability.
Maintenance: With the transition to Confluent Cloud, EVO Banco no longer needs a dedicated team to maintain the infrastructure, and this allows them to allocate those resources to other strategic areas as well as multiply their FTE cost savings by a factor of 10.
Choosing the right technical solution
The agility and flexibility of Confluent Cloud was critical to EVO Banco’s development teams.
The introduction of the “Kafka stream” concept simplified the development process by allowing the use of languages such as Java or Scala together with data access libraries, industrializing the process and providing great flexibility without requiring the adoption of paradigms with complex learning curves. “This allowed us to design agile solutions that could meet needs in a short period of time and quickly bring them into production. We were able to significantly reduce the time to market for new products and services,” said Pérez Fernández.
In addition, the platform’s ease of use was a key factor in the decision. With Confluent Cloud, EVO Banco was able to access a wide range of data sources via virtually unlimited connectors. Configuration was simple; just specify the type of data source required and provide the connection details. In this way, the company was able to start channeling data instantly and seamlessly.
In short, Confluent Cloud stood out for its efficiency, flexibility, and ease of use, making it the perfect choice for EVO Banco’s data development and management needs.
At EVO Banco, extensive use is made of the different functionalities that Confluent offers, adapting them to its specific needs:
Cluster management: EVO Banco uses both shared development and test clusters as well as its own clusters. The choice of cluster level is tailored to specific needs and is directly related to the associated costs. This functional flexibility is essential in the company’s development and operation process.
Stream lineage: To ensure the integrity of operations and address incidents efficiently, EVO Banco takes advantage of the stream lineage functionality offered by Confluent Cloud. This makes it possible to track the flow of data and diagnose problems, even in critical areas such as core banking.
Security and stream governance: Security and governance are fundamental components of EVO Banco’s operation. Confluent Cloud allows the bank to accurately manage roles and access, ensuring that each user has access only to relevant and authorized information. This is especially important in an environment where security is a high priority.
Stream processing: ksqlDB is used in areas where data transformation and other advanced operations related to data processing are required.
Schema Registry: Schema Registry ensures consistent data quality across the platform and that data conforms to a specific contract with EVO Banco’s messaging service providers. By exposing data externally, they avoid potential problems, such as malformed data, by validating everything that comes in through external producers against the corresponding schema. This ensures structural and semantic consistency of data, which is fundamental to maintaining the integrity of EVO Banco’s system.
Restricting access to data, especially data that is considered sensitive, such as financial information, contracts, account balances and credits, is a critical concern in the financial environment.
As a result, Confluent Cloud enables EVO Banco to share trustworthy data across the enterprise, ensuring data integrity for auditing and compliance with Bank of Spain regulations.
Essential use cases for data streaming
In a core banking scenario that prevents immediate transfers, EVO Banco has identified a key differentiator. Customer data from the bank’s website, mobile app, and other information systems is channeled into Confluent, and with generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), agents can determine when a customer has unsuccessfully attempted to carry out a specific action (e.g., a transfer). The agent can then take proactive or reactive measures to communicate with the customer and provide reassurance in times of uncertainty.
EVO Banco has incorporated AI into its operations, using machine learning and mathematical models to create individual financial profiles. This makes it possible to compare some customers with others and offer an exceptional level of personalization. In addition, they have introduced the option to operate through voice commands in real-time, transforming voice into text and processing it through Confluent in real-time.
An additional strategy to leverage the value of real-time data has been the early detection and prevention of fraud. Using Confluent Cloud, the team has developed highly adaptive fraud solutions, making them highly responsive to evolving threats and sophisticated attacks. With accurate data feeding fraud algorithms, there is minimal customer intervention, reducing customer friction accessing the digital services.
“The agility Confluent provides to incorporate new data sources and establish new themes to aggregate stored information, along with the ability to apply pattern detection models, has been fundamental. Speed in taking action is essential when facing daily attacks, as every day of delay can represent additional financial losses,” said Pérez Fernández.
Another significant use case relates to real-time customer insight and how this perspective will transform banking interactions in the future. Through the consideration of parameters such as the customer’s location, behavior, and circumstances in real-time, based on their transactional activities, a deeper understanding of how the customer interacts with the bank enables them to offer products and services at the right time and with a high degree of relevance.
EVO Banco can adapt its financial product offering in real-time, sending push messages through the mobile app to the customer. For example, while a customer browses for accounts with the best interest rate, a notification will offer them options to meet their needs, which may include real-time treasury bill interest rates, allowing the possibility to adjust the deposit offer to the customer based on changing market conditions.
Business results
Through Net Promoter Score (NPS) results, EVO Banco has been positioned as the best bank in Spain in terms of customer satisfaction.
“Confluent Cloud stands out for its focus on security, especially in highly regulated industries such as banking and healthcare,” said Pérez Fernández. It provides an enterprise layer that ensures the security of sensitive data and complies with regulations.
Confluent Cloud has allowed the bank to implement in-stream fraud detection for more than 500,000 daily transactions. That’s enabled EVO Banco to significantly increase the accuracy of its fraud algorithms and reduce reaction times to just seconds.
Since adopting Confluent Cloud, the bank has reached an average of 500 fraudulent transactions blocked daily and reduced weekly fraud losses by 99%.
Event streaming across multiple data sources gives a 360° view of all systems and mobile and online banking applications, ensuring accurate data-driven decisions to improve the customer experience.
With a microservices architecture, it is easier to develop, deploy, and scale new features and services resulting in a faster time to market, potentially in days, rather than months.
Switching banks is a rare action, yet EVO Banco has experienced a steady growth of around 5% per year, with variations due to economic conditions. This growth has generated a steady increase in the volume of data that needs to be processed on the platform. The elasticity of Confluent Cloud allows EVO Banco to handle these loads without worry. Previously, they had to anticipate and increase costs and equipment to cope with this growth, but now that is no longer a concern.
What’s next for EVO Banco
EVO Banco is driven by the motto “never the same,” and has managed to transform this dynamic through the use of real-time data, allowing them to make decisions at the right time and offer a more agile and satisfactory banking experience.
“Technology is essential to meet customer needs in a market that demands instant information. A lack of streaming technology can jeopardize the survival of a business that wants to be a leader in its sector,” said Pérez Fernández.