KEYBANK.COMKeyBank Fuels National
Digital Bank Initiativewith Data in Motion andConfluent

Following the acquisition of Laurel Road, a digital consumer lending business,
KeyBank launched an initiative to build a national digital bank focused on doctors,
dentists, and other healthcare professionals looking to refinance student loans andbuy homes. The initiative is viewed as a growth engine for KeyBank, which is alreadyHeadquarters
Cleveland, Ohio, United States
Industry
Financial Services
Challenge
Power a national digital bank initiative andenterprise-wide digital transformation byreducing the time and effort needed tointegrate systems

among the nation’s largest bank-based financial services companies, with assets ofapproximately $170.5 billion.
Confluent’s platform for data in motion is helping to fuel the national digital bankinitiative and the wider digital transformation underway at KeyBank. A major
motivation for this transformation was reducing time to market for new products bydemocratizing data and decoupling systems across the IT landscape.
“Like any large bank or large enterprise, we have a variety of vendor applications,custom applications, and other systems that are tightly coupled to one another. In thepast, new projects typically entailed developing specific point-to-point integrations
for exchanging data but did little to address the needs of other downstream systems

Solutionthat would benefit from the same data,” says Scott Tucker, Director of Open Bank

Create a center of excellence to help teams

Engineering at KeyBank. “With Confluent, we can put that data on a topic and have it

harness data in motion with Confluent tomake data available to systems throughout
the bankResults• Time-to-market estimates halved.
• Mainframe and message queue costestimates cut.

• De-risked adoption of a new technology
paradigm.

Continuous improvement is part of ourculture at KeyBank, and the adoptionof Confluent is a good example of ourcommitment to staying a technology leader
within the banking industry.
– Michael Roseman, KeyBankconsumed by multiple systems. From a technical standpoint, democratizing the datain this way provides tremendous value both in terms of efficiency and project cost
reductions. And from a business standpoint, projects that can make use of data that’s
already on a topic benefit from significantly shorter time to market.”©2021 Confluent, Inc. | confluent.io1

KEYBANK.COM

The Open Banking Technology group at KeyBank is a newly
formed center of excellence (COE), created to help application
development teams make the most of technologies such as
Confluent and Google Apigee to drive new products and improve

Business Results•

Time-to-market estimates halved. “With Confluent
Platform we’re making data available via event streams,

customer experiences. “Continuous improvement is part of ourwhich means integration between systems is now a much

culture at KeyBank, and the adoption of Confluent is a goodlighter lift,” says Tucker. “A project that would take threemonths if we were working on the integration from bothsides, will take significantly less time and effort because we

KeyBank has laid thegroundwork for its national
digital bank initiative by taking
a strategic, holistic approach toevent-driven infrastructure.

only need to develop and test the consumer side.”•implement more use cases on Confluent, we will reduce ourmainframe and legacy message queue costs,” says Roseman.
“We expect to see a measurable reduction in mainframe
MIPS, IBM MQ usage, and in our use of ETL process
software.”•example of our commitment to staying a technology leader inthe banking industry,” says Michael Roseman, SVP and Chief
Architect at KeyBank. “Our investment in a center of excellenceenables us to build a comprehensive enterprise infrastructure forharnessing data in motion – not just one-off projects and siloed
efforts – which will reduce costs and accelerate the delivery ofmodern banking solutions for our customers.”
KeyBank continues to roll out Confluent in support of itsMainframe and message queue cost estimates cut. “As weDe-risked adoption of a new technology paradigm. “Opensource products like Apache Kafka® can be a risk without
enterprise support, and especially for a business-criticalplatform,” says Tucker. “Confluent engineers helped guide us
through not only the setup, but also through the use cases
for data in motion that we wanted to implement. Theirexpertise and experience with other financial institutions
and organizations like ours was a great help in building up
our own expertise. They were always very open to working
with our team to make sure we were on the right path for us.”ongoing digitization initiative and plans to use real-time events
to push forward with several use cases in fraud detection, leadmanagement, and microservice communication. The bank isalso moving certain on-premises data warehouse operations
to Google Cloud Platform. “We are currently in the process ofmoving our on-prem Teradata data marts to Google BigQuery,and we see a strong use case for Confluent Cloud with thatmove,” says Roseman. “We’ll soon be running Confluent Platform
with Anthos on bare metal, which will also help us in the transition.”

Technical Solution
Traditionally, many KeyBank systems have been integrated with a
top-down, project-oriented approach that limited flexibility. Oncea project was complete, the systems involved would be tightly
coupled, and if another system needed access to the same data, it
often required another entire project to be approved and funded.

We are currently in the process of moving our on-prem
Teradata data marts to Google BigQuery, and we see a strong
use case for Confluent Cloud with that move.
– Michael Roseman, SVP and Chief Architect at KeyBank©2021 Confluent, Inc. | confluent.io2KEYBANK.COM“Before Confluent, if we opened a new account for a customer“We recognized that we were not yet experts in event-driven

and we knew that our online banking system needed to get thatarchitectures, and while we ultimately own the decisions for what

new account information, for example, we’d implement that

we’re going to do, we counted on the experts from Confluent tohard integration between the two systems,” says Tucker. “But inhelp us guide our decision-making process,” says Tucker.

practice, many systems need to be tied to that account opening
event, including marketing systems that send a welcome email oradditional product offers, regulatory systems, and our customer
master system. With Confluent’s platform for data in motion,
once we put that data out on a topic it’s available to multiple
downstream systems whenever they want to consume it.”Some development teams within the bank recognized theThe team will use Confluent Platform capabilities such as
Schema Registry to manage and evolve schemas, ksqlDB toaccelerate streaming app development, Cluster Linking tosimplify replication and support disaster recovery strategies, andconnectors to easily integrate data from legacy mainframes tomodern systems. “These Confluent Platform capabilities are a
big help to us, because instead of having to roll our own, we canpotential value that Confluent and an event-driven architecturesimply take advantage of what Confluent has built on top of thewould bring to their individual projects. Seeing this groundswell

open source Kafka platform,” Tucker says.

of need, KeyBank established the Open Banking Technology
team as a center of excellence for data in motion with Confluent
Platform, API management with the Apigee platform, andlegacy message queues. “We didn’t want to merely address

KeyBank has laid the groundwork for its national digital bankinitiative by taking a strategic, holistic approach to event-driven
infrastructure.

individual use cases with isolated pockets of Kafka,” says

“From a technology perspective at KeyBank, we want to continue

Roseman. “Creating the COE was a way to build an enterprise

to invest in new platforms that deliver new capabilities andsolution to meet the needs of our organization as a whole, while

improve our ability to deliver faster. When we saw the demandat the same time increasing efficiency and taking advantage offor harnessing data in motion growing, working with Confluent

economies of scale.” The COE is positioned to help teams employ

and investing in our center of excellence enabled us to implement

the best technology for each specific use case. “Having Confluent,a solution in a way that best benefits the enterprise by reducing

Apigee, and message queues under a common umbrella gives

complexity, costs, and time to market,” says Mike Onders, EVP

us the opportunity to help application teams use the option orChief Data Officer and Divisional CIO at Keybank.

combination of options that’s going to work best for them inaccessing and moving data,” says Tucker.
As the team began ramping up, they worked with Confluent

Learn More About Keybank
www.keybank.com

engineers to ensure their deployment strategy and architecture
were well aligned with the organization’s short-term use casesand longer-term objectives.

From a technology perspective at KeyBank, we want to continue to invest
in new platforms that deliver new capabilities and improve our ability todeliver faster. When we saw the demand for harnessing data in motion
growing, working with Confluent and investing in our center of excellenceenabled us to implement a solution in a way that best benefits theenterprise by reducing complexity, costs, and time to market.
– Mike Onders, EVP Chief Data Officer and Divisional CIO©2021 Confluent, Inc. | confluent.io3