KeyBank fuels digital bank with Confluent

KeyBank, one of the United States' largest financial services companies with approximately $170.5 billion in assets, sought to modernize its IT infrastructure to fuel its national digital bank initiative and broader digital transformation. The primary goal was to reduce time-to-market for new products by democratizing data access and decoupling systems across the enterprise. To achieve this, KeyBank established an Open Banking Technology Group as a center of excellence (COE) to harness data in motion using Confluent Platform.

The COE's mission was to enable application development teams to leverage technologies like Confluent and Google Apigee, driving innovation and enhancing customer experiences. By adopting Confluent, KeyBank aimed to move away from tightly coupled systems and point-to-point integrations. This shift allowed data to be placed on a central topic and consumed by multiple downstream systems, fostering efficiency and reducing project costs. Michael Roseman, SVP and Chief Architect at KeyBank, emphasized the importance of continuous improvement and staying a technology leader in the banking industry.

Confluent's platform facilitated the creation of an event-driven architecture, enabling real-time data availability across the organization. This was particularly crucial as KeyBank expanded its digital consumer lending business through the acquisition of Laurel Road. With Confluent, opening a new account triggers an event that seamlessly updates various systems, including online banking, marketing, regulatory, and customer master systems. This streamlined process contrasts sharply with the previous approach, where each system required a dedicated integration.

Looking ahead, KeyBank plans to extend its use of real-time events to support fraud detection, lead management, and microservice communication. The bank is also migrating on-premises data warehouse operations to Google Cloud Platform, with Confluent Cloud playing a key role in this transition. By running Confluent Platform with Anthos on bare metal, KeyBank aims to further optimize its data infrastructure and accelerate the delivery of modern banking solutions.

Value Results:

• 50% Reduction in Time-to-Market: Confluent Platform's event streams significantly reduced the integration effort between systems, halving the time required to launch new projects.

• Reduced Mainframe and Message Queue Costs: By implementing more use cases on Confluent, KeyBank anticipates a measurable reduction in mainframe MIPS, IBM MQ usage, and ETL process software costs.

• De-risked Technology Adoption: Confluent's enterprise support and guidance mitigated the risks associated with adopting open-source technologies like Apache Kafka, ensuring a smooth transition and building internal expertise.

• Strategic Event-Driven Infrastructure: KeyBank has laid the groundwork for its national digital bank initiative by taking a strategic, holistic approach to event-driven infrastructure.