Case Study

BANKERSHEALTHCAREGROUP.COMBankers Healthcare Group Builds Modern Data
Platform for Continued Growth with Confluent

Leading a transformation in the financial services industry, Bankers Healthcare Group(BHG) has originated more than $9 billion in loan solutions over the past 20 years. Thecompany has combined data, analytics, and information technology to create the country’s
largest community bank loan and product network and establish itself as the industry
leader in unsecured business and personal loans.
BHG’s track record of innovative financial solutions has led to tremendous growth: theHeadquarters
Davie, Florida, USAcompany has been ranked more than a dozen times on the Inc. 500/5000 list of theIndustry
Financial Services

With growth targets for the coming years increasing sharply, the company is modernizing

Challenge
Update an aging legacy IT
architecture that was not capableof keeping pace with the company’s
continued year-over-year growthscale to support growth, and also accelerate the innovations for which the company hasSolution
Work with Confluent to implement amodern, scalable architecture basedon real-time streaming

is quickly becoming not only a central highway for our data with their vast connector

Results• New integrations are completed indays, not weeks

Throughout the modernization initiative, BHG worked with Confluent Professional• Data silos eliminatedtable extensive expertise in building modern streaming architectures and infrastructure

fastest-growing companies in the U.S.
its enterprise architecture with Confluent and Apache Kafka® to ensure it will continue tobecome known. “You can only get so far with traditional three-tiered architecture before
you start seeing escalating costs, increasing technical debt, and spaghetti integrations
that slow new product development,” says Andrew Greiner, Vice President of EnterpriseArchitecture at Bankers Healthcare Group. “BHG is a fast-moving company, and Confluent
portfolio, but a streaming transformation engine as well for a vast number of use cases.
Confluent is at the core of everything we’re doing right now. It’s playing a key role in ourability to scale and enabling our product teams to come up with new and original products.”
Services to build a streaming architecture tailored to the company’s specific needs as a
rapidly growing leader in financial services. “Confluent solutions architects brought to the• The groundwork for innovation
has been establishedpatterns. From a knowledge standpoint, their architectures are the tip of the spear for• Cloud strategy facilitatedwith stability and helped us avoid second-guessing ourselves on our architecture andthe future of the financial services industry,” says Greiner. “They showed us how to build
patterns. From top to bottom, the Confluent team we worked with has been top class. Weare making Confluent the true backbone of BHG, including leveraging over 20 Confluent
connectors across both modern, cloud-based technologies and legacy systems, to help
integrate our critical apps and data systems together.”© 2021 Confluent, Inc. | Confluent.io1

Case Study | Bankers Healthcare Group

Technical Solution
Among the early priorities for BHG in decoupling legacy systems
was leveraging Confluent’s connector portfolio to start linking
elements of their infrastructure to Confluent. They deployed
Kafka Connect with source and sink connectors for a varietyof systems—including Confluent’s pre-built connectors for
Salesforce, Elasticsearch, and New Relic—to tie them into thenew BHG streaming architecture. “We focused much of our earlyattention on deploying Confluent’s pre-built connectors, because
that’s where we saw the most technical debt,” explains Greiner.
“Our operations and data management workflows can now feed
directly into New Relic and Elasticsearch. In addition, Salesforce isa big part of our business strategy, so it was important to get ourcredit card data into Salesforce. Today, that data, along with web
activity data from our web forms, is flowing through Confluent,
leveraging their connectors to unlock data silos and bridge to thenew world of modern data architectures.”
As the architecture modernization progresses, some BHG teams
have begun exploring ksqlDB for stream transformations andenriching data as it flows, with early use cases now entering thefinal phases of development. ksqlDB, which enables teams todevelop stream processing applications with SQL-like queries,
is designed to minimize coding—an advantage that Greiner has
also noticed with the connectors. “We’re starting to feel some of
the benefits of no-code, low-code solutions, so we no longer needcostly development resources to complete integrations,” he notes.

BHG is now preparing for the next phase of the modernization,
which involves extending Confluent more deeply into a wider rangeof core business processes and systems, including analytics, loanorigination, loan management, marketing, and the company’sauction platform.
“The new streaming architecture we built with Confluent enables
our product teams to dream up new products and exciting newideas, instead of simply making existing products less costly tooperate and keeping the lights on. Our goal is to remove heavy
back-end processes which take minutes to figure out what productto offer a customer. Instead, as soon as a customer hits thestream, we can now identify the best product for them and offer iton the spot,” says Greiner. “That’s what real-time streaming does
for us and when our teams recognize it, I can see the light bulbs
going on as innovative ideas take shape.”
To help fuel those new products and BHG’s continued growth,
the company is looking to scale its talent—which Greiner does
not expect to be difficult, given the excitement that’s building
and BHG’s reputation as an award-winning workplace. “The next
big thing for us is to increase in-house training and recruitingfor our new architecture,” he says. “I think our engagementwith Confluent will help in training, recruiting, and ultimately, inachieving our business goals. The Confluent team has supported
us in reinforcing the rich culture of innovation at BHG, which feeds
our ability to attract talented people who can help us reach thenext set of goals.”

Business Results
New integrations are completed in days, not weeks. “We’re atthe point now where we can rapidly deploy Confluent’s pre-built
connectors to quickly and reliably get data into Confluent, perform
transformations, and move it to a data hub and on to otherlocations,” says Greiner. “Depending on the use case—for example,integrating a data lake and a data hub—integrations like that used
to take weeks of work. With Confluent, they take days, and insome cases less than a day.”

The groundwork for innovation has been established. “A valuable
aspect of our engagement with Confluent is that it went beyond
just Kafka,” says Greiner. “Confluent engineers brought acompetence in large organization evolutions and amplified thatfeeling of innovation that our teams thrive on. What we’ve beenable to achieve together in a short time has been remarkable, andthat’s why I’m looking forward to an expanded engagement goingforward.”

Data silos eliminated. “In the past, we had numerous siloedenvironments, which led to scenarios where we’d have twodifferent teams writing two different connection layers to access
data,” says Greiner. “With Confluent, our teams no longer workin silos. Each team is working in the same Kafka environment,so data across the variety of BHG’s business domains is now
accessible, especially with the array of Confluent connectors,
all critical data sources and sinks, like MongoDB, Elasticsearch,Salesforce, Azure, and many more. We simply didn’t have thatlevel of data accessibility before now.”

Cloud strategy facilitated. “One of the draws of moving to thecloud and Microsoft Azure was to get away from the noise of theon-prem environment, with its legacy hardware and systems,”
says Greiner. “Confluent fit in well with that strategy because, asa managed service, it helped us get started quickly while giving us
the option to deploy in any environment we need to.”Learn More About Bankers Healthcare Grouphttps://bankershealthcaregroup.com© 2021 Confluent, Inc. | Confluent.io2