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

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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

Challenges

  • De Volksbank is moving towards a more data-driven approach, but their current message queue (MQ) solution doesn't meet their requirements for this. It’s hard to scale and doesn’t support a hybrid architecture.
  • Real-time data is crucial in understanding customer behavior. With MQ, de Volksbank isn’t able to collect and feed real-time data from four different brands into its data analytics platform for automated analyses with desired volumes.
  • Kafka is already being used across a couple of applications. However, this concerns 'local' Kafka clusters with no interconnections, which makes sharing data difficult.
  • Teams are spending too much time on maintaining all these “local” Kafka clusters - achieving high-volume and high-resiliency has proven a challenge.

Why Volksbank Choose Axual

  • With Axual, de Volksbank introduced a pub/sub architecture to effectively integrate applications across their different domains and provide real-time connectivity between all parts of the organization.
  • Axual is used as a streaming business event bus as well as a bulk transport mechanism for a wide range of applications.
  • Axual’s self-service capabilities makes it easy for teams to connect heir own applications. The platform team delivers this as-a-service to 50 internal teams.
  • Axual is deployed across multiple availability zones, and allows for automatic recovery.
  • Data governance is built in - control data flows from start to finish at any time.
  • 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).

“We were at a crossroads, with legacy technology preventing a solid digital transformation, and an ambitious strategy for customer centricity underlining requirements for becoming data-driven. We really needed the Axual platform to allow us to make the leap. With Axual,

Roger Stoffers | Enterprise Architect

1 billion

Messages sent per day

50+

Internal teams onboarded

30%

Time saved on maintenance by devops teams

Results

  • With the adoption of the Axual platform, de Volksbank continues to take concrete steps towards a solid data-driven approach and is able to easily share data with any team and from any app.
  • Axual’s event streaming platform feeds the de Volksbank’s data analytics platform with real-time data making it possible to perform quick analyses and automated decisions.
  • The out-of-the-box enterprise readiness (such as data governance and multi-tenancy) of the event streaming platform allows de Volksbank to focus on business and customer value.
  • Maintenance is now centralized and used for one single event streaming platform. De Volksbank was able to reduce the amount of DevOps teams working on maintenance by 3. Those teams can now have a full focus on delivering value and innovation.

Integrations:

  • Amazon Web Services (AWS)
  • Support for “everything-as-code”
  • BiZZdesign Enterprise Studio