NORD/LB Accelerates IT Transformation with Confluent

NORD/LB, one of Germany's leading commercial banks with assets exceeding 164 billion euros, embarked on a bank-wide IT transformation program named NORD/LB 2024. This initiative involved a substantial 500 million euro investment in modern IT systems and digitalization efforts. A key objective was to enhance the bank's agility, flexibility, and responsiveness to evolving industry demands, positioning it for sustained growth and the ability to develop innovative, competitive products.

As part of this transformative journey, NORD/LB chose Confluent to build a new core banking platform based on event streaming. This platform aimed to enable advanced, real-time analytics, improve fraud detection capabilities, enhance customer retention strategies, and refine trade and investment analysis. It also sought to address the challenge of siloed data, which previously required significant effort for data loading, mapping, and assembly through point-to-point integrations.

Confluent's event-driven architecture provided NORD/LB with a scalable and highly available messaging infrastructure, decoupling data producers from consumers. This eliminated complex dependency chains of releases, upstream systems, and data consumers, which had previously resulted in significant costs and time inefficiencies. The COVID-19 pandemic further accelerated NORD/LB's digitalization efforts, reinforcing the need for agility in navigating industry changes.

The implementation of Confluent has yielded several significant benefits for NORD/LB:

• Competitive Differentiation: Confluent's technology empowers NORD/LB to develop competitively differentiated products for the future, leveraging extensive data analysis capabilities.

• Streamlined Event Streaming Adoption: Expert guidance from Confluent engineers ensured a smooth architecture and deployment, optimizing the rollout process.

• Reduced Streaming Infrastructure Costs: NORD/LB plans to use Multi-Region Clusters to replicate data between data centers, minimizing downtime and reducing infrastructure costs associated with duplicate servers.