Financial Services Organization

About the Business

This financial services organization aims to revolutionize how money works in Southeast Asia. Launched in the Philippines in 2021, it is the first all-digital bank, or “neobank,” in Southeast Asia. Providing retail products like deposits, loans, savings accounts, payments, and credit cards – all on a highly secure digital banking platform – the organization expands banking services to the 70% of Filipinos who don’t use banks. 

The Business Challenges

While the financial services organization had a large amount of data and various data sources, it needed to gain the knowledge and experience required to derive insights. New to the Google Cloud Platform (GCP), the data team struggled to ingest, process, and organize data for analytics-based use cases. Data tables were too complex, and reporting logic was inconsistent. Various stakeholders, data providers, and business users muddied data accuracy leaving little for data analysts to rely on. These barriers made it difficult to model data for use cases, significantly slowing time-to-insights and the organization’s ultimate goal of becoming data-driven. 

Due to the nature of financial data, the requirements frequently change along with source data structures and formatting. The financial services organization needed to land all that sensitive data quickly and safely for real-time reporting within regulatory time requirements. Without a robust analytics platform, the organization could not efficiently gain value from its data or solve use cases with scalable applications. 

The 2nd Watch Solution

The financial services organization partnered with 2nd Watch because of our experience as a Google Cloud Partner and in the financial services industry. 2nd Watch needed to give the organization an infrastructure to ingest, process, and model clean data and accelerate business intelligence while being user-friendly.

2nd Watch built a data lake on GCP with a fully automated and scalable ingestion pipeline. The financial services organization now has a process for bringing data into the data lake from multiple sources. To increase accessibility and usability, 2nd Watch implemented the data lake through a GCP landing zone. That helps the data team deploy, use, and scale Google Cloud services more securely as they grow and adopt more cloud-based workloads.

We set up several fully managed tools and services to leverage automation for productivity and cost management. The organization uses Cloud Composer for open-source workflow orchestration, Dataflow for data processing, Cloud Data Loss Prevention to reduce data risk, and Cloud Logging for real-time log management – all fully-managed Google Cloud services. 2nd Watch also implemented Cloud Dataproc for data lake modernization, Pub/Sub for event ingestion and delivery, BigQuery, Identity and Access Management (IAM), and Cloud Bigtable – an enterprise-grade, NoSQL database service with single-digit millisecond latency.

The Business Benefits

After partnering with 2nd Watch, the financial services organization has the infrastructure to access, analyze, and confidently apply its data for intelligent business decisions. The organization is accelerating time-to-insights and enhancing reporting capabilities with the fully automated analytical platform provided by 2nd Watch.

CIC reports that used to take days to produce and were often inconsistent are now accurate, dependable, and ready within an hour. Additional reports are also available to help customers. For example, one report shows customer delinquency and loan status combined with repayment options so customers can choose how to proceed. These types of impactful and complex reports are making use case fulfillment possible at a much quicker rate.

The organization’s data analysts can onboard new use cases with robust security using the GCP landing zone in two to three days. With the ability to join datasets across various sources and create comprehensive data models for use cases, the financial services organization is becoming data-driven.

Using the 2nd Watch team of cloud experts, the organization has the secure platform and Google Cloud tools and services to continue scaling data analytics for significant business wins.