The Evolution of Kafka at ING Bank

At the New York Summit, Ferd Scheepers, Chief Information Architect for ING, took you on a journey during his keynote. In this new session we want to tell you more about this journey and how it relates to Kafka. It all started within ING when a solution was needed to improve our fraud detection system for online banking. The system was expensive, not resilient and hard to scale up to be able to process the ever growing amount of data needed for real-time fraud detection.

Kafka was a perfect solution to solve these issues and once we had our Kafka cluster in production other use cases started pouring in and Kafka became an essential component in our banks data streaming pipeline. Kafka has evolved from a simple proof of concept in 2014 to the so called Event Bus that supports a large number of data streaming use cases.

We will deep dive into some of these use cases where Kafka is used in combination with Nginx, Flink and Cassandra. Besides our current use cases, our future plans will be presented and our global Customer Contact and Notification architecture will be explained. This architecture will enable us to provide our customers with spot on, relevant and actionable insights, based on real-time data.

We will also discuss the challenges of supporting multiple ING countries with their specific requirements and show how our hub and spoke model will help to overcome these challenges. We see Kafka as a great addition to our company. It enables us to improve our customers banking experience and helps us to become a truly event-driven bank.We believe that other companies can learn and benefit from our experiences and the challenges that we have encountered.