Confluent Receives Financial Services Technology Competency from AWS: Unlocking New Possibilities for the Banking Sector

I’m thrilled to announce that Confluent has received the Financial Services Competency from AWS. The AWS Competency Program recognizes and promotes AWS Partners who exhibit technical expertise and customer success, enabling them to market and differentiate their businesses to AWS customers effectively.

To achieve the AWS Financial Services Competency, companies must provide cloud-based offerings that help accelerate innovation for banks, insurance companies, capital market firms, and payment processors of all sizes. Confluent is transforming financial services (fin serv) firms by helping them seamlessly connect systems and applications for data aggregation and processing at scale.

Here are a handful of critical use cases that Confluent addresses within the financial services space:

With such processed data, customers can build context, automate risk scoring, and respond to threats accurately and in real time.

Many banks, such as 10x Banking, use Confluent and AWS to modernize their legacy systems to innovate faster, deliver hyper-personalized customer experiences, and compete with digital-native banks.

“Our mission is to make banking 10x better for banks, for customers, and society. To do that, we need a cloud-native data streaming platform that is also 10x more reliable, 10x more performant than Apache Kafka.”

– Mark Holt, Chief Product, and Engineering Officer at 10x Banking

Judo Bank needed to streamline their operations by replacing a series of point-to-point integrations and their core lending platform. They partnered with Confluent and AWS to help build a new CRM system and loan originator capabilities that helped the bank adopt an event-first approach and leverage event-driven principles.

“Confluent is a strategic platform for us. With every project we look at, we now think about how we use Confluent to move things around and join things together”

— Niko Bielovich, General Manager, Services Management at Judo Bank

See more fin serv customer stories here

We continue to work with many customers across the financial services industry, helping them deliver rich customer experiences, mitigate business risk, and future-proof for scale. Here are the key areas we’ve worked in:

• Fraud detection and prevention Users can prevent fraud by continuously updating and sharing a fraud threat score for every user using structured and unstructured data.

• Cybersecurity and regulatory compliance Confluent Cloud users capture and aggregate structured and unstructured data for centralized management, identifying real-time threats, filtering data for downstream analysis, aggregating data across business lines, and conforming to reporting standards.

• Real-time trading data platform With Confluent, develop an event-driven trading data architecture that supports the volume, velocity, and variety your trading needs demand. Users stream market data and trade multiple application feeds for a single real-time point of view of all trading operations activity.

• Hyper-personalized customer experiences You can consolidate data from legacy siloed systems (e.g., mainframes, RDBMs) across different lines of business (retail, capital markets, mortgage, etc.) to get a completely unified view of customers. Users can easily match customers to products and services and serve up the best possible content.

Specifically, when it comes to fraud detection, mitigating fraud in the financial services sector presents a formidable challenge for numerous institutions. Companies encounter hurdles in managing and securing data, technology, and process silos, hampering their ability to detect and prevent fraud in real time.

While fraud teams have access to transactional data within their systems, security teams face challenges obtaining unstructured, contextual data from cybersecurity and infosec tools and extracting information from data at rest systems.

To combat these obstacles, fin serv companies require a comprehensive approach that eases data collection from diverse sources, real-time data processing during transmission, and seamless data distribution to the right locations in the right format at the right time. All of these activities together enable effective and timely fraud prevention.

As mentioned in our whitepaper, 10 Ways Confluent Drives Transformation in Financial Firms, Confluent offers a real-time, decoupled data platform that allows developers to write reliable applications and add or remove services as necessary without affecting other developers. Our customers can develop applications with up-to-date data, which ensures confident decision-making.

We allow banks to aggregate all transactional data and contextual data, which is crucial in identifying fraud. This includes structured data (e.g., funds transfer amount) and unstructured data (e.g., geolocation) formats and historical and real-time data, which is critical for threat detection. By harnessing this comprehensive data view, organizations can score risk at scale, generate real-time fraud threat vectors for each entity and update them with every customer interaction or event.

With Confluent, you can proactively detect security issues with fraud models that provide accurate, automated fraud detection. Furthermore, we offer a complete audit trail of activity maintained through an immutable, append-only, stateless distributed log, while stateful and persistent data support stream processing applications.

In addition to receiving the Financial Services Technology Competency this year, we were also awarded the Data & Analytics Software competency in 2021 and have received several Amazon Service Readys between 2020 and 2022, including Amazon RDS, AWS Lambda, AWS Outposts, Amazon Redshift, and AWS PrivateLink.

Our collaboration and partnership with AWS provides our joint customers with a highly flexible and reliable approach to acquiring and implementing our data streaming solution.Confluent makes it easy for the financial services sector to securely connect on-prem, multi-cloud, and edge data to AWS and unify everything without overburdening internal engineering teams.

With 120+ pre-built connectors, you can build real-time streaming pipelines with just a few clicks to Amazon S3, Amazon Redshift, Amazon Kinesis, Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), Amazon DynamoDB, and more. Also, deeper integrations with our Connect with Confluent (CwC) partners, such as AWS Lambda, can be found directly within the AWS console, making it easier for their customers to use data streams.

No matter where your data lives, Confluent helps integrate and process all of your data in real time, to eliminate the burdens and risks of self-managing Kafka. If you are ready to start with Confluent, sign up for a free trial of Confluent Cloud on AWS Marketplace. New sign-ups receive $400 to spend within Confluent Cloud during your first 30 days.