How Confluent Helps You Deliver New Customer Experiences and Act on Insights Faster

What’s your AI strategy? How are you making your service as easy to use as those from major cloud companies? How quickly can you roll out new features to customers?

These are common questions technology executives  face on a daily basis. They must accelerate innovation across the board––from deploying new features and making decisions to generating revenue and saving money.

But how do they achieve this, especially when the foundational building blocks––the data their businesses collect and generate––have exploded in volume, variety, and velocity––yet not necessarily in value?

For many businesses, that value remains locked because they’re still reliant on an approach that treats data as something to analyze and act on only hours or days after it’s created, rather than instantly.

Confluent takes an approach that shifts the processing, analysis, and governance of data closer to where and when it’s generated. Companies that have adopted Confluent’s data streaming platform (DSP) have leveraged this model to deploy new features like real-time fraud detection, doing so faster than traditional data architectures allow. They’re saving more revenue and increasing their value to customers more quickly. And they’ve been able to use real-time data streaming to create more contextualized and responsive customer experiences.

Enable Real-Time Fraud Detection and Speed Up Service Delivery 

Companies often have vast amounts of data stored in siloed warehouses, and one part of the business typically isn’t aware that another arm has generated data that could be useful to its own operations. Confluent’s approach unifies these data streams, enabling real-time actions.

EVO Banco, a Spanish digital-native bank established in 2012, turned to Confluent Cloud to implement in-stream fraud detection for more than 500,000 daily transactions. As a result, EVO Banco has significantly increased the accuracy of its fraud algorithms and reduced reaction times to just seconds. Since adopting Confluent Cloud, the bank has blocked an average of 500 fraudulent transactions daily and reduced weekly fraud losses by 99%.

Similarly, Bank Rakyat Indonesia, which serves 75 million customers and is the largest bank in Indonesia, is using Confluent's DSP to build and deploy real-time event-driven systems that can detect and stop fraud immediately, according to Kaspar Situmorang, Executive Vice President, Digital Center of Excellence at BRI.

BRI used to take between two weeks and a month to detect fraud, Situmorang explains, because it first needed to send the information to a data warehouse and then to an analyst. Now, BRI can detect and stop fraud in real time, becoming the first bank in Indonesia with this capability.

This real-time data streaming approach also enables BRI to deliver services to customers dramatically faster, including through its microlending application, Pinang.

Before adopting this approach, loan disbursement used to take two weeks of paper-based, manual processing. “With the Pinang app, that has been cut to two minutes,” Situmorang says. “Behind the scenes that improvement is powered by Confluent Platform, which we use for digital verification, instant scoring, digital signatures, and communicating a massive amount of information in real-time.”

Accelerate Time to Market for New Features and Enhance the Customer Experience

Confluent’s real-time data approach allows companies to speed up the deployment of new customer features. Often, these features leverage the real-time data that Confluent’s DSP processes and analyzes as it’s created.

Bitvavo, a leading European cryptocurrency exchange, seeks to bridge the gap between traditional currencies and digital assets by offering transparent fees, a wide range of assets, and an easy-to-use platform.

Bitvavo's business relies on real-time transactions and precise data management, as it can reach up to €1.5 billion in trading volume per day. Since adopting Confluent, Bitvavo has been able to improve its real-time data streaming and can give users trading data in milliseconds without delays, including updates for trading charts. Previously, this could take up to three minutes.

“We are now able to provide real-time candle charts and other market data to customers within seconds of a trade being executed. Previously, this was much more challenging, and it involved maintaining thousands of tables and systems for such tasks. Now, we can handle this much more efficiently,” says Marcos Maia, Senior Staff Engineer at Bitvavo.

Audacy, a leading American audio content company that operates over-the-air broadcasts, digital audio platforms, and podcasts, found it difficult to access and make use of the wealth of listener data it had accumulated, due in large part to its architecture of mostly point-to-point integrations with multiple data sources and schemas.

Audacy used Confluent’s fully managed connectors to easily integrate with their existing tools and systems, allowing them to connect various data sources and destinations effortlessly. Audacy has seen dramatic improvements in key performance areas, including streamlined development cycles, faster time-to-market for new features, and increased audience engagement.

“With a data backplane fueled by Confluent, we’ve observed a significant increase in development velocity, which has accelerated the development of new features and improvements to our services by 40%, if not more,” says Vitaly Shoykhet, Senior VP of Engineering at Audacy.

Notably, one of those features is an interactive tool called “Tap to Record,” which Audacy was able to deliver ahead of schedule. This feature allows audiences to record a message and submit it to a radio station in near real time, thanks to a simplified data architecture and improved flexibility. It leverages Confluent’s near real-time streaming capabilities and fault tolerance to ensure accurate and timely message delivery, resulting in an enhanced customer experience, deeper listener engagement, and a reduced workload for radio stations.

“Since adopting Confluent, we’ve been able to provide a more seamless customer experience,” Shoykhet says. “Now, in near real time, we’re able to make screen layout adjustments, update page metadata, and provide listeners with new show alerts and details so they can access the latest content instantly.”

Deliver Personalized Experiences With Real-Time Data Streaming

Confluent also allows businesses to develop more personalized experiences through the real-time analysis of customer data. AO, one of the UK’s leading appliance and electronics retailers, saw significant growth in its online retail operations during the COVID-19 pandemic, with CEO and founder John Roberts explaining that it “saw 10 years’ change in consumer behavior in just 10 weeks.”

To achieve this, when AO adopted a real-time data streaming approach, one of its first moves was extracting information from order processing and other systems using change data capture (CDC). Using Confluent Cloud, AO has been able to combine historical customer data, clickstream data––which provides additional context about customer behavior––and other real-time digital signals from the business. This information allows AO to deliver hyper-personalized recommendations to customers as they shop.

"Our hyper-personalized approach is delivering measurable results,” says Jon Vines, Engineering Lead at AO.com. “In our A/B testing, we’ve seen a significant increase in customer conversion rates. That is proof that our decision to adopt a real-time event streaming approach was the right one."

Start Generating Value from Your Data

Customers all over the world have discovered the benefits of real-time data streaming and Confluent’s DSP. Banks, retailers, carmakers, digital services companies, manufacturing firms, and more have all been able to increase their business velocity and agility, accelerate innovation, and unlock the value of their data.

When you're ready to kick off your data-driven journey, see how Confluent can help you accelerate your transformation of data into new customer experiences.