Spain
Partnered with
Ibermatica, an Ayesa Company, is the integration partner who designed, developed, and migrated Kutxabank to Cloudera. Ibermatica has developed successful business user cases based on Cloudera technologies and its main components, such as phishing detection, cyberfraud, clustering of customers and their movement to improve their banking experience, and advice on cryptocurrency investment. Day to day, we follow up helping to improve Kutxabank’s commitment to big data digital transformation experience.
Kutxabank is a Spanish savings bank based in Bilbao with €65.6 billion in assets. Formed in 2012 from the merger of three Basque savings banks—BBK, Kutxa, and Vital—the institution began operations with a strong position of solvency and an undisputed leadership in its core areas of business. Since its inception, the financial institution has upheld a steadfast commitment to serving its communities and promoting economic and social development.
Looking to further its success, Kutxabank set about to optimize its operations and turned to Cloudera.
Increasing need for longer-term storage with greater capacity
Kutxabank began operations using a data warehouse (DW) that quickly grew obsolete. With its limited storage size and inability to handle the increasing volume of data, Kutxabank administrators were unable to modernize the DW’s operations, a critical ongoing process highlighted in the TDWI report, Data Warehouse Modernization in the Age of Big Data Analytics. Less than four years after its rollout, the DW was failing to meet the bank’s business needs, leading to inefficiencies in the reporting process, excessive environment management work, rigid policies for monitoring and managing the data lifecycle such as periodic data archiving, and data removal.
Kutxabank required a new solution that could provide longer-term storage with greater capacity and enhanced data governance, especially for its Credit Granting and Credit Risk Monitoring models.
Cloudera provides Kutxabank with a solid on-premises system
To meet these demands, Kutxabank analyzed several big data distributions by using benchmarks, running cost studies and projecting future trends. Despite the emergence of cloud solutions at the time, their operations demanded a solid system that would still work on-premises. Kutxabank selected Cloudera based on the results of their tests and market references and for Cloudera Manager’s ease of management.
Kutxabank's big data optimization process started in 2018. The first use case implemented was DW Offloading: downloading less frequently used data, or “cold data” from the DW, and preserving it long term for regulatory reasons and occasional statistical modeling. Resources on its Conventional DW, meanwhile, were freed up for “hot data,” aggregate data that needs to be more frequently accessed online by main offices and central services. Once the system was set up, an engine for simple and complex data quality rules was developed and it became available to the Chief Data Officer (CDO) and the data owners of the financial institution.
More recently, Kutxabank has migrated to the latest on-site version and created an Analytics Management Office to gradually evolve its big data strategy by implementing new use cases for its infrastructure.
“Thanks to the subsequent migration to Cloudera, we have managed to design an efficient, robust and scalable architecture,” said Ziortza Ibarrondo Garay, Kutxabank’s Head of Commercial and Information Systems. “We're exploring ways that Cloudera’s open data lakehouse can help us create new ways to visualize and use data more efficiently.”
Since its migration to Cloudera, the company has not only increased the efficiency of its data management, but is also exploring new emerging technologies like using artificial intelligence to streamline operations.
