With data streaming, banks and financial services (FinServ) organizations can use massive amounts of data for real-time decisions. Data streaming helps organizations prevent fraud, deliver differentiated customer experiences, boost compliance, and more. Companies worldwide, including over 80% of the Fortune 100, use the open source platform Apache Kafka as the foundation for their data streaming efforts. 

But increasingly complex Kafka architectures are exposing businesses to ever-greater risks. In the highly regulated financial sector, insufficient data controls may cause leaks that lead to costly penalties and decreased customer trust. Data quality issues lead to inaccurate analysis and bad downstream decisions. 

Gaining control over your Kafka architecture creates opportunities for your business to capture market share, grow profits, and stay on the right side of regulation. With high-quality real-time data, you can make the most effective decisions without sacrificing security or compliance. 

Learn how Conduktor can help you simplify your Kafka operations and securely stream high-quality data throughout your organization. 

Conduktor: Data Streaming for Banking and Financial Services

Conduktor unites teams and systems using Apache Kafka, maximizing the utility and availability of your data.

What is Conduktor?

Conduktor is an Enterprise Data Management (EDM) platform for data streaming. It serves as a bridge between Kafka providers and downstream consumers, including applications and LLMs as well as platforms such as Snowflake or Fabric. 

Conduktor enables you to scale data streaming with security and control. Traditional methods for managing data quality in Kafka are heavily manual, time-consuming, and leave room for human error. Similarly, Kafka isn’t secure out of the box, and common authentication strategies can quickly become complex and unmanageable without an abstraction layer between Kafka and your applications. 

Conduktor is that abstraction layer. When it comes to quality, our approach is to stop bad data at the source. We intercept, filter, alter, and govern data before it enters your systems to prevent erroneous behavior and outcomes. Then, we enable you to centrally configure and enforce encryption, data masking, and access rules to ensure compliance across your business. 

Conduktor benefits for banking and financial services

Competition is growing, regulation is increasing, and economic conditions are in flux. Data can put you ahead of the curve — and Conduktor helps you ensure your streaming data is accessible, secure, and reliable. 

Conduktor enables you to: 

• Balance agility and governance across teams with guardrails that block invalid or costly configurations and stop bad data at the source. 

• Ensure regulatory compliance and secure data sharing with an enterprise-grade shield over your Kafka infrastructure. 

• Accelerate time to market by bringing all your real-time data together for collaboration across tools, teams, and tech stacks. 

When we surveyed Conduktor customers, 96% of respondents agreed that their productivity has increased since adopting Conduktor. 

Conduktor use cases for banking and financial services

From asset managers such as Capital Group to infrastructure providers such as Bankart, organizations across financial services use Conduktor to enable safe, reliable data streaming at scale. Here are some of the most impactful ways to use streaming data in banking and financial services. 

Customer experience

Competition for customers is heating up as neobanks and fintechs offer innovative products and services and legacy banks step up their technology offerings. 

Streaming data offers a way for organizations to understand their customers, personalize customer engagement, and tailor products and services to customers’ needs and wants. By using real-time data to tailor the customer experience, banks and financial services institutions can anticipate demand and foster long-term loyalty. 

You can: 

• Optimize next-best-offer marketing based on up-to-date knowledge of a customer’s preferences and behaviors.

• Deliver timely marketing messages via the best-fit channels.

• Provide targeted financial advice that reflects a customer’s unique circumstances.

• Tailor customer service and support.

Of course, personalization is only valuable if you can ensure that sensitive data remains secure. Conduktor helps you stay compliant while offering a highly targeted customer experience. 

Fraud prevention

Financial services companies have always battled against fraudsters, but factors such as the growth in digitalization and the rise of generative AI are making the fight even harder. Organizations face increases in transaction volume, as well as sophisticated new fraud techniques, with some fraudsters going as far to develop deepfake video, audio, and documents. 

Streaming data enables organizations to better defend against fraud while minimizing the impact on legitimate transactions. With real-time data, you can: 

• Automate risk scoring to rapidly assess transactions for the likelihood of fraud.

• Analyze transactions in context with other data to identify potential indicators of fraud.

• Use user behavior analytics to identify anomalous behavior that may indicate fraud.

• Strengthen your cybersecurity posture to prevent hacking and data breaches.

Real-time payments

Waiting days for money to move between accounts is increasingly a thing of the past as services like Venmo and Zelle become ubiquitous. ACI Worldwide reports that nearly a fifth of all electronic transactions in 2023 were real-time, expected to rise to one in four by 2028. 

Streaming data is the backbone of real-time payments — but banks and financial services companies need to be confident that their infrastructure can handle both the scale and security requirements associated with financial transactions. 

With Conduktor, you can use streaming data to offer and scale real-time payments while ensuring compliance. For example, Bankart enables banks across southeastern Europe to offer real-time payments while meeting compliance mandates from MasterCard, Visa, and the PCI-DSS standard. 

Compliance and risk resilience

New regulations are making it even more important to implement streaming data with maximal security and control. As technology becomes an integral part of financial services, regulators are focused on improving cybersecurity and operational stability. The industry is particularly focused on the EU’s Digital Operations Resilience Act (DORA), effective January 17, 2025. 

DORA is designed to strengthen financial institutions against the threat of technology-related disruptions, like cyberattacks or vendor outages. That means banks, financial services companies, and their technology vendors need comprehensive, real-time insight into potential information and communication technology (ICT) risks. 

A growing Kafka architecture can easily become a black box that impedes compliance with DORA. With Conduktor, you can: 

• Gain full visibility into your streaming data pipelines to proactively monitor, identify, and mitigate operational or security risks.

• Receive real-time alerts on anomalous behavior and incidents so you can quickly classify and report incidents to relevant authorities.

• Thoroughly test your Kafka environments in preparation for disruptions or attacks, including stress tests, failover simulations, and vulnerability assessments.

• Unify your security model across multiple systems to secure data at every stage of the streaming lifecycle.

• Generate detailed logs and reports of Kafka operations and incidents.

• Streamline disaster recovery, minimize manual intervention, and reduce mean time to recover (MTTR) by automating switching of clusters in the event of disruptions.

DORA and similar regulations in other regions set a high bar for operational resilience, but with Conduktor, you can ensure your streaming data infrastructure is set up to succeed. 

Scale safe, reliable streaming data with Conduktor

Ready to learn more about how Conduktor can help your retail business get ahead with streaming data? Book a demo or get started for free.