14 Dec 2023

Real-Time and Event-Driven Banking at Rabobank

Read how Rabobank became an event-driven bank and scaled Kafka across 150+ DevOps teams.

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Rabobank and Apache Kafka

Rabobank is a Dutch multinational banking and financial services company headquartered in Utrecht, Netherlands. Rabobank is active in forty countries worldwide, has over 43,000 employees, and serves approximately 10 million customers. Compelling Event Rabobank decided to move towards 100% digital and become a real-time, event-driven bank from batch jobs to real-time. They chose Apache Kafka as the engine for their event streaming platform but quickly discovered that Kafka was costly to maintain and needed a number of features to scale across the enterprise while guarding governance and security.

Read the full use case about how Rabobank Real-Time and Event-Driven

Download the case study

Answers to your questions about Axual’s All-in-one Kafka Platform

Are you curious about our All-in-one Kafka platform? Dive into our FAQs
for all the details you need, and find the answers to your burning questions.

Why should I use Axual for Apache Kafka?

Simplification: Apache Kafka users benefit from Axual's simplification of managing Kafka complexities through a user-friendly interface and tools that abstract away much of the operational overhead associated with Kafka clusters, thereby reducing the learning curve and operational burden for teams.Enterprise-Grade Security: Security is a top priority in enterprise environments. Axual's out-of-the-box security features, including encryption, authentication, and authorization mechanisms, provide immediate protection for your data and Kafka infrastructure, ensuring they are secure from unauthorized access and breaches.

Which connectors can I use with Axual for Apache Kafka?

Axual for Apache Kafka supports a wide range of connectors, enhancing its versatility and integration capabilities. Some of the connectors you can use with Axual include: Debezium, Cassandra, JDBC and IBM 
 MQ and many more. Explore our full list of connecters(link to connectors page)

What’s included in Axual's customer support for Kafka?

Using Axual includes access to support services and expertise from Kafka and streaming data specialists. This can be invaluable for troubleshooting issues, optimizing performance, and planning for future growth.

Case Study: De Volksbank

Industry:
Infrastructure
Marketing
Results:

20% Increase in revenue, 1000+ saved hours.

Infrastructure
Marketing

Challenge

De Volksbank is the fourth biggest bank in The Netherlands, active on the Dutch retail market with a focus on mortgages, payments and savings. The company has four brands: ASN Bank, BLG Wonen, RegioBank and SNS. Every brand has its own identity and appearance. De Volksbank aims to fulfil the financial needs of its customers humanely, efficiently and sustainably.

Driven by its mission and vision, De Volksbank has a focus on data-driven services, a customer-centric approach, a high level of customer experience and an omni-channel/multi-brand strategy. Its data platform is expected to deliver complete lineage, accountability and real-time insights where possible.

In 2019 De Volksbank was looking for a supplier with similar values to deliver an event streaming platform (ESP). This platform is positioned as both a streaming business event bus as well as a bulk transport mechanism for a wide range of applications, including asynchronous event integration, event streaming, real-time analytics, business intelligence source and sink, data-driven services and complex event processing.

Solution

  • Introduce a pub/sub architecture to effectively integrate applications in different domains
  • Allowing business processes and applications to evolve rapidly to keep up with the pace of change demanded by the market
“Introduce a pub/sub architecture to effectively integrate applications in different domains
Allowing business processes and applications to evolve rapidly to keep up with the pace of change demanded by the market”

Results

  • Axual Platform is implemented and in production as the Enterprise Streaming Platform for real-time connectivity between all parts of the organization.
  • New key functionalities and requirements with respect to the ESPEvents can be received more than once by consumers (scalability, robustness)
  • Events can be consumed, processed and re-submitted without custom development and application development
  • Support for off-the-shelf,  hybrid cloud architectures
  • Events can arise anywhere (on-premise/off-premise) and be consumed anywhere (on-premise/off-premise)
  • The hybrid architecture can be easily managed: automatic balancing, automatic recovery options
  • Low level of manual interferenceGeneration of new streams / topics
  • Authorizations of sending and receiving applicationsStarting and stopping of applications (publishing and consuming  events)

20%

Increase in overall revenue

25%

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40%

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Considerations

  • The PubSub Event Streaming Platform will support the additional key requirements on top of existing middleware capabilities. Because of the broader applicability of event streaming based on Kafka, the new architecture would – in the long term – make it possible to phase out / replace the existing IBM MQ and Hortonworks implementations.
  • The PubSub platform is positioned as a “thin middleware layer”. Business logic and business rules will not reside in the middleware layer but in business applications and (event) analytics applications.