KBTG Bank

KBTG in Thailand uses data virtualization to run faster in the race to open banking.

The dream of open banking is to provide banking services anywhere and everywhere. Instead of the traditional 1—1 consumer-to-bank relationship, banking will be embedded in your favorite social app or service. For consumers, open banking promises to provide banking services where you want them. For example, you might use Amazon, Paypal, and Facebook to send money or gifts to friends with a simple click or swipe.

In the quest to win, an all-out technology arms race between traditional banks, startups, and social media behemoths is underway. Fintech startups like Stripe, TransferWise, and Zopa aim to disrupt old-school banking styles. Facebook, Amazon, and Alibaba have the pole position on social banking. Traditional banks are reimagining themselves as innovators. Payments disruptors like PayPal, Venmo, Apple, and China’s Tencent are vying to own the global fabric of payments.

In Thailand, KBTG Bank illustrates how one player is innovating with data. KBTG has 16 million retail banking customers. At the heart of every digital banking service is data, so access to data is the first port of call in any innovative system. But although every fintech business wants an agile, efficient, scalable data lake, most have a data swamp: balkanized data sources, a mix of old and new, real-time and streaming data, and a maze of organizational barriers.

Data virtualization helped KBTG tame their data swamp. It helps teams to turn dozens of independent data sources into one virtual data warehouse with nearly the same performance as a single system. So, instead of over-using ETL to create a bigger data swamp for APIs, data virtualization leaves data where it is. This provides a unified interface to customer information as if it was, indeed, a single system.

Data virtualization helps firms quickly combine data into any form needed by a digital service. Depending on the size, scale, and organization of data in any given bank, that data may live in dozens of disparate systems. With data virtualization, the complexity of the back-end data architecture is abstracted away.

“A lot of things you needed a bank for you can now do through 7-Eleven or with wallets. We’re competing against non-banks now,” said Fred Roteseree, deputy managing director, “so we need to handle a lot more transactions, a lot more activities. Data virtualization brings the business and IT together because we can deliver services in a much more timely manner.”

For example, KBTG’s “My Portfolio” mobile phone app shows users every product and account they have. The data that powers these services is stored in multiple systems—deposit account, credit card, mutual fund. Each service call can require data stored in 12 to 15 databases. By virtualizing its data access, KBTG quickly combines it all.

“Now that we use [data virtualization], our teams think about data differently,” says Roteseree. “We can create a new data source within days as opposed to six months and deliver them within a single layer. Web services can be built in a few hours.”

KBTG Bank, and data virtualization, helps Open Banking competitors move more quickly than every before. In the arms race to open-up banking services all over the world, its becoming an indispensable tool.