Rabobank: Facilitating financial independence through real-time data insights

Founded by farmers in the late 19th century, Rabobank specializes in agriculture financing and sustainability-oriented banking across global markets. At its home base in the Netherlands, Rabobank 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.

Challenge

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 analyse 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 centralised 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.

Solution

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 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.

Rabobank also leveraged Cloudera Professional Services, allowing the business to learn how to optimise the security of its data environment and manage data access in a trusted, governed manner.

Results

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.