Data in Motion: Powering Pollinate's Core Business with Confluent

Pollinate Builds the Bridge Between Large Banks and Small Businesses

Pollinate was founded in 2017 with the mission of helping large banks reconnect with small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). With this sector making up more than 99% of all businesses, the market potential for banks is enormous. In the past, banks would have called upon a third party to make these connections, since it was not regarded as a core part of the business. The problem with this approach, however, was that banks lost control of their relationships with this key business sector. “Pollinate’s model helps large banks reconnect with SMBs directly, offering payment processing, merchant acquisition, and compelling digital experiences,” says Will Jones, Chief Business Officer at Pollinate. 

Pollinate’s Seamless Scaling With Confluent Cloud

The Pollinate platform currently supports prominent client banks such as Truist Bank US, National Australia Bank (NAB), and NatWest in the UK, with a robust and growing network of over 70,000 end merchants. 

Before taking on more merchants, the team continually assesses the platform’s bandwidth to ensure that the application and data ingestion is performing well. “We needed to do internal testing to ensure that our platform could support 100,000 merchants before we roll it out, and we were able to do that with Confluent Cloud,” says Anthony Lehmann, Head of Platform Engineering at Pollinate. 

Having previously run everything through open-source Kafka, Pollinate moved over to the Confluent Platform, where it processed millions of transactions. After this move, the volume of transactions increased significantly again. For ease of use, the company then moved to Confluent Cloud, which had a very successful rollout with streaming partners. 

Once that integration was complete, the rest of the microservices fell right into place on the platform. “We almost forget about it, which is great, because that means it’s doing its job,” says Lehmann. “Confluent Cloud managed service allows us to keep things up to date. It was a godsend. We were overworked and stressed out, and this helped us manage all the pieces of the puzzle.”  

Unrestricted Data Flow Fuels Pollinate's Mission

Pollinate’s Confluent Cloud implementation has been successful across several key areas. These include low-latency data streaming, which enables high throughput and avoids ingestion bottlenecks, as well as enhanced developer productivity through seamless CI/CD integration, while also maintaining full compliance with financial regulations. By leveraging Confluent’s fully managed infrastructure and guaranteed SLAs, Pollinate consistently meets its own service-level commitments.

Pollinate’s current financial data ingestion primarily relies on flat files. However, their collaboration with NatWest, for example, demonstrated a more efficient method—a direct data stream integration between its Kafka systems. Pollinate aims to replicate this direct streaming model with all its partners, but its feasibility depends on the banks' systems, many of which use mainframes. Because of this, Pollinate requires flexible data ingestion capabilities to accommodate the diverse operational approaches of various banks.

“We have successfully developed a multi-tenant platform, operating on a single dedicated cluster, which has proven highly effective. Our goal is to onboard more clients swiftly onto this platform,” says Lehmann. This journey has involved a comprehensive platform overhaul, providing valuable insights into deployments, highly available autoscaling, and cloud infrastructure, beyond just Confluent-specific aspects. This allows Pollinate to present financial transactional data to clients more quickly through their portal. 

By equipping banks with payment solutions for small businesses, Polinate empowers these businesses to track every interaction and transaction with their customers. This generates a wealth of powerful, actionable data that is incredibly dynamic, moving seamlessly between various systems, including Pollinate, the payments processor, the merchant, and the bank. 

For Pollinate, data is truly the lifeblood of all operations, and ensuring its unrestricted flow is crucial. As Lehmann states, “Data is the beating heart of what we do. Ensuring the free flow of data is imperative, and our ability to manage data in motion with Confluent is essential to Pollinate.” 

Pollinate's Results: Efficiency, Scale, and Real-Time Value

Pollinate's partnership with Confluent has yielded significant results, both internally for their platform engineering team and externally for their banking clients and their small business merchants, including: 

• Operational Efficiency: For Pollinate’s platform team, the transition to Confluent Cloud has dramatically improved efficiency and reduced operational burdens. Confluent manages the infrastructure, freeing up Pollinate's team to focus on developing new applications and meeting the needs of the business. Provisioning a new platform now takes days, compared to months previously. 

• Scalability and Agility: Confluent Cloud supports their multi-tenant platform, allowing them to onboard more clients quickly.

• Real-Time Data and Insights: Confluent Cloud provides a continuous stream-processing capability. With actionable insights on critical operational activities, such as inventory, cash flow, and customer engagement, Pollinate is adding tangible value to the banking relationship.

• Developer Productivity: The event-driven microservices architecture supported by Confluent Cloud decouples teams and reduces dependencies, allowing developers to ship new features, such as onboarding workflows and notification systems, independently and with greater speed.

On the business front, the real-time data streaming capabilities powered by Confluent Cloud have been instrumental in delivering value to banking partners and their SMB customers. "Internally, the speed and ability to move at pace is key," says Jones. He points to Truist Bank, a top ten U.S. bank, as a prime example, noting that the bank’s end customers love the ease of access and user-friendly experience for statements. This positive feedback, received within the first week of rollout, has encouraged Truist to scale up its operation. 

By providing banks with payment solutions for small businesses, Pollinate empowers these businesses to capture business that they were previously not able to engage with as quickly. With actionable insights on critical operational activities, such as inventory, cash flow, and customer engagement, Pollinate is adding tangible value to the banking relationship.

What’s Next for Pollinate and Confluent? 

Pollinate is poised for significant growth, driven by its strategic focus on scalability, cost efficiency, and delivering enhanced value to their banking partners and their small business customers. As Pollinate expands its footprint, it anticipates substantial cost reductions by leveraging existing infrastructure for onboarding new clients, particularly in the U.S. market. “Our projection is that our Confluent partnership will lead to a 80-90% decrease in client onboarding costs, with a direct 50% cost reduction attributable to the full migration to Confluent Cloud,” says Jones.

The company recognizes the critical need to empower small businesses with greater financial accessibility. With approximately 35% of U.S. small businesses currently turned down for finance due to an inability to demonstrate their need for a loan, Pollinate is actively exploring partnerships in embedded finance—an integral part of their mission of guiding banks into the next phase of supporting SMBs.

Pollinate will continue to leverage Confluent Cloud heavily as a cornerstone of their infrastructure, using shared, dedicated clusters across their client base. “We’re committed to data in motion, coupled with Confluent’s scalable operating models and technology,” says Jones.