Provides spending insights for Australian banking customers
Reduced implementation time by weeks through established pre-configurations
Eliminated time spent maintaining business-critical environments
Frees up engineers to spend more time on new digital services
Macquarie Bank adopted DataStax Astra DB on Google Cloud to enrich payment data and provide its customers with greater insights into spending.
Macquarie Bank adopted DataStax Astra DB on Google Cloud to enrich payment data and provide its customers with greater insights into spending.
Paving the way for customer-first digital banking
Macquarie is a leading digital bank in Australia. The bank has seen strong growth in loans and deposits over the past several years and now serves around two million clients. Part of the reason for this success is the bank's continued investment in digital technologies. As a digital bank, customers expect more from its mobile and online banking offering. Every interaction should be fast, reliable, and personalized to help customers take greater control of their finances.
Macquarie Bank tries to do more for customers by taking the complex data and processes involved in any financial transaction and making them more consumable and interactive. For instance, when customers make a purchase, the transaction isn't always listed in the statement under the common brand name, making it more difficult for customers to remember what the purchase was. The bank wanted to change that.
The strong relationship between DataStax and Google Cloud was very important to us. We now have all of our business-critical data and workloads on Google Cloud, which allows us to improve performance even further and provide faster services for our customers.
Jason O'Connell
CTO, Banking & Financial Services, Macquarie Group
Macquarie Bank enlisted support from DataStax to create an always-on, high-performance cloud native database for unstructured NoSQL data, capable of storing all available information about transactions and sellers. Using this data, Macquarie Bank can enrich payments with information that customers want, such as a recognizable company or brand name; purchase category such as food, entertainment, or bills; or even a map of the store location. Customers can further enrich data with custom tags or pictures of receipts.
Macquarie Bank initially ran its database environment in containers on the cloud, but Jason O'Connell, CTO of Banking & Financial Services, wanted IT teams to focus on delivering more valuable banking services, rather than managing environments. That's when the bank decided to migrate to DataStax Astra DB, powered by Apache Cassandra. Running on Google Cloud, the managed service offering from DataStax delivers even greater performance and scalability while integrating seamlessly with the rest of the bank's Google Cloud environment.
Offloading operations to support new digital services
With DataStax Astra DB on Google Cloud, we can spend less time running the product and more time looking toward the future.
Pedram Sanayei
Head of Cloud Platforms, Banking & Financial Services, Macquarie Group
Macquarie Bank currently runs approximately 99% of its environment in a public multi-cloud environment. Google Cloud supports data and digital services across the bank. All digital experiences leverage microservices that run on containers within Google Kubernetes Engine. APIs managed through Apigee connect various services, while solutions such as Pub/Sub and Dataflow manage flows for eventing.
From a technical perspective, working through the Cloud Marketplace means that the bank can trust the integrations and pre-configurations established by DataStax and Google Cloud. This allowed Macquarie Bank to get started with Astra DB faster, shaving weeks off implementation.
With Astra DB, Macquarie Bank can provide even more enriched transaction data to its customers. Customers can now filter transactions by category, view graphs of spending, and use natural language search to ask questions — such as "how much money was spent on the family dog in the past year?" This insight into spending helps customers create more informed budgets and have greater control over their finances.
DataStax also supports Macquarie Bank's entitlement service, which helps ensure that anyone interacting with the bank's systems — whether they're an employee or customer — only sees information that they need to see. Every digital interaction requires a call to the entitlement service, meaning high availability and low latency.
By using the Astra DB managed service, Macquarie Bank can leverage the scalability, reliability, and performance of the Google Cloud environment to keep systems running no matter what the volumes might be. Macquarie engineers now have more free time to work on supporting the creation of new digital services, such as more advanced budgeting tools.
"Cassandra was quite a cost for us to run," says O'Connell. "It required a practice within BFS to appropriately run that software and ensure that we met the reliability and availability goals that we require as a 24x7 retail bank. Being able to run that through Astra DB allows us to take the effort we were spending running Cassandra and move it to actually using Cassandra."
As Macquarie Bank looks to deliver more personalized experiences to customers, the big question becomes how to unlock data faster. O'Connell sees potential for AI to provide critical insights to customers, engineers, and internal business teams.
Macquarie Bank, part of the Australian-headquartered financial services company Macquarie Group, is a digital bank that provides individuals and businesses with everyday banking, home loans, and wealth management services.
Industry: Financial Services
Location: Australia
Products: Google Kubernetes Engine, Apigee, Pub/Sub, Dataflow
About Google Cloud partner- DataStax
DataStax operates at the forefront of the generative AI revolution. Its Astra DB vector database powers real-world, production-level AI applications using real-time data.
