Banking and financial services organizations are all about customer relationships. By connecting with customers and assisting alongside their financial journeys, these organizations become trusted partners. Building trust and confidence increases the share of wallet and lifetime value. To achieve that on a global scale, you need to leverage big data and predictive analytics.
As customers navigate their personal finances, they are looking for a bank they can trust. They want products, tools, and features that puts their interests at the forefront. Gaining visibility into their spending habits, savings goals, and investment performance help improve their financial lives.
Rabobank is building this trusted partnership with its customers. One of the largest financial services institutions in the Netherlands, with over 8.3 million customers worldwide, the bank offers a broad range of products and services tailored to the Dutch market and aims to help its customers become more self-reliant in their finances.
Collecting and processing data at scale
In order to do this, Rabobank needed access to a varied mix of high quality, accurate, and timely customer data. The challenge to providing this insight, however, was the ability to execute sophisticated and timely data analytics at scale. Though Rabobank could conduct batch processing and analyse large amounts of historical data daily, it lacked the ability to stream and analyze data in real-time. This limited the organization’s ability to not only give customers up-to-date insights into their finances but also provide them with useful advice on how to improve their financial status quo.
Rabobank was also faced with the challenge of shortening time-to-market. The bank was looking to create a new data environment that would not only allow it to create a centralized repository of high-quality data but also would allow them to stream and conduct data analytics on the fly to create actionable insights and deliver a strong customer experience.
Gaining real-time data insights
Rabobank searched the market for a new solution that would help it establish a secure, governed database and execute processing-heavy tasks. Working with Cloudera, Rabobank selected HDP and Cloudera DataFlow (CDF) due to its ability to cope with heavy pressures on data processing and its capability of ingesting large quantities of streaming data.
Through the platform, Rabobank was able to create a new data lake that would allow its employees to run faster queries across a single SQL interface including both historical and real-time data. From customers’ loan repayment patterns to up-to-the-minute transaction records, Rabobank and its customers could now immediately access the valuable data needed to help them understand the status of their financial situation.
“Cloudera helped our organization get to the next level by providing us with a streaming data platform, which provides us with real-time data. Rabobank is aiming for a self-service environment for our data, and we want our customers to be able to access the data at a click of the button in a secure and controlled manner. Within a financial institution, it’s very important to be in control of your data, and Cloudera is helping us to support that.” -Martijn Groen, IT lead of the Data Lake, Rabobank
Rabobank also leveraged Cloudera Professional Services, allowing the business to learn how to optimize the security of its data environment and manage data access in a trusted, governed manner.
Improving the financial lives of customers
By gaining the ability to stream real-time data, Rabobank can now detect warning signals in extremely early stages of where clients may go into default. Through their new, governed data lake, Rabobank’s account managers are also able to access an in-depth overview of customer data, enabling them to generate liquidity overviews and advise customers on how to avoid defaulting. With HDP and CDF’s rapid data processing, Rabobank could create better models and more accurately predict warning signals, as they now had immediate access to advanced data analytics results.
The bank continues to keep data at the heart of its mission, making it more accessible to customers. Through these warnings and advice, customers are able to adjust their course to avoid financial disasters before they happen. These efforts directly support the goal of facilitating financial independence and improving the financial lives of its customers.
For more stories about Cloudera customers visit: https://www.cloudera.com/about/customers.html
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