New Way Now: Revolut fast-tracks fintech innovation with a self-serve Google data platform
25Featured in this video: Denis Agiev, Lead Data Architect and Head of Engineering AI at Revolut
Executive summary: With more than 60 million customers on their financial services app, Revolut built a self-service data platform powered by Google Kubernetes Engine for scale, security, flexibility, and availability of services. The team also uses Google Cloud Storage, Dataproc, and Looker in a modular setup that keeps Revolut nimble so they can innovate faster and adopt new software or products quickly. With massive amounts of data gathered constantly, Revolut needs timely, accessible insights to provide great service to customers, understand market demands, and launch new products. In the current digital financial services landscape, the data teams depend on this modern architecture to maintain agility and stay ahead of the competition.
Challenge: To provide personalized services, Revolut needed to anticipate customer needs and serve internal teams by building a data platform that takes full advantage of AI and maintains open standards for maximum flexibility and easy deployments. The team also sought to scale globally, provision infrastructure, and offer localized services for a consistently great customer experience.
Solution: With Google Cloud, Revolut developed a lakehouse-based, unified data platform using easy-to-deploy, loosely coupled components. Revolut’s team chose Dataproc, a managed service, to run multiple open source proxy engines like Trino, Spark, and Iceberg on top of the same data. This flexibility allowed product teams to choose their engine depending on the task at hand, so it’s possible to quickly process large datasets for ML and AI workloads, along with supporting Looker. Both customers and internal teams can access Looker’s BI analytics insights to make data-based decisions, with more than 13,000 dashboards running for more than 4,000 users per week.
Results: Revolut’s customers around the world can access the app quickly, thanks to strong connectivity and bandwidth across Google Cloud regions, and get personalized suggestions for better, data-driven decision making. Revolut can ensure secure, compliant transactions without slowdowns. And Google Cloud’s infrastructure means the team can access an infinite pool of resources as they build and grow.
Key takeaways and highlights from our interview with Denis Agiev, Lead Data Architect and Head of Engineering AI at Revolut:
→ “Legacy banks are slow, and their siloed systems hold them back from innovation. It’s hard for them to fully leverage AI’s potential and operationalize AI at scale. Revolut's modern approach allows us to move faster and make decisions just right on time.”
→ “In a highly regulated environment, it's crucial for us to have automated governance policies and guardrails so we can detect fraud earlier. We can manage our risks and make the right decisions to optimize our operations.”
→ “It’s pretty amazing nowadays that there is no need to do the heavy maintenance work of the hardware and infrastructure. We can seamlessly run any kind of open source solutions.”
Google Cloud products used: Google Kubernetes Engine, Google Cloud Storage, Dataproc, Looker
Learn more:
→ Revolut and Google Cloud: https://goo.gle/3TS8M4u
→ Read the Revolut Case Study: https://goo.gle/4klqU1m