As Poland’s leading banking institution, with over 12.1 million customers and nearly a thousand branches nationwide, PKO Bank Polski plays a central role in the country’s financial ecosystem. Its technological infrastructure impacts millions of transactions across the retail and corporate banking sectors. With this scale of operations, ensuring uninterrupted system performance is critical for maintaining trust in the banking system.
Overview
Due to the rapidly evolving banking landscape, PKO Bank Polski faced a big infrastructure challenge. The bank partnered with Neontri to develop Data Hub – an offloading system designed to relieve strain on its infrastructure. The goal was twofold: boost the core system’s performance and optimize the data retrieval process. This set the stage for a transformative project to address the bank’s immediate challenges and position it for future growth.
Challenge
Back in the day, many financial institutions relied on large mainframe systems designed to handle everything in one place. While these systems had centralized servers with multiple processors and substantial RAM, they couldn’t accommodate the high volume of user requests brought on by digital banking. Most of those requests were read queries, with only a small portion of traffic coming from actual transactions (write operations).
Customers constantly checked their account balances, reviewed transaction histories, and looked up product information through mobile apps and digital platforms, causing the bank to experience an increase in traffic. This surge in digital engagement exposed several vulnerabilities in their mainframe-based architecture:
- Expensive maintenance and scaling. The legacy systems couldn’t scale efficiently to meet growing demands, yet their maintenance still required substantial resources.
- Modification risks. Any changes to the mainframe carried significant risks of system failures, making updates and improvements difficult.
- Digital channel strain. The high traffic from mobile apps and other digital channels overwhelmed the core system, leading to performance bottlenecks and delays in retrieving data related to client operations.
To address these limitations, PKO Bank Polski recognized the need for a solution to reduce the strain on its core system.
Solution
PKO Bank Polski engaged Neontri to develop an offloading system to manage the increased data load caused by digital and mobile banking adoption. The project began with the creation of a replication system. It was designed to capture and record every change made in the original banking system and then reflect it in a new platform called the Data Hub. By implementing the ETL component, we ensured the solution operated as fast as possible, achieving near real-time data replication.
However, to do that, we had to create a distributed system capable of handling large volumes of data. We recognized that simply implementing another traditional database into the bank’s environment wouldn’t work, as it would likely encounter the same limitations as the original system. Such platforms often struggle with high availability, fault tolerance, and processing numerous inputs simultaneously.
To address these concerns, the team opted for a NoSQL system based on Apache Cassandra. Neontri leveraged the DataStax Enterprise solution, which could provide robust performance, scalability, and reliability for the bank’s evolving data management needs. Initially, we built a distributed cluster with 20 nodes to handle the data.
Our team also recreated the original banking system’s interface as an API. This approach allowed the offloading system to “speak the same language” as the previous version, enabling seamless integration with the bank’s existing projects.
The client also realized this solution could be expanded to address other issues within their core system. Thus, over the years, the Neontri team built several features that support the bank’s operations:
- Sophisticated search
We implemented a sophisticated search engine with fuzzy search algorithms, enabling the bank’s clients to find relevant transactions by entering just 3-4 characters. This system employs smart autocomplete functionality, which tolerates typos, slang, and abbreviations, significantly reducing search time and improving accuracy. This feature is particularly valuable for mobile app users, where the smaller screen and keyboard can limit traditional search methods.
- Transactions enrichment
The specialized data enrichment system enables banks to provide additional transaction information to their clients. This enhancement does not impact the speed of payment processing or require personally identifiable information from customers.
Here is how it works: Whenever a customer makes a purchase, the system automatically pulls up additional details about the transaction, such as the merchant’s official name, logo, website, physical address, and contact information. It also categorizes the business and pinpoints the transaction’s GPS location.
By providing this enriched data, PKO Bank Polski has improved customer satisfaction and reduced the volume of inquiries to their support channels, as users can now easily recognize and understand their transactions.
Cooperation process
When we first started working on Data Hub, we assembled a core team of six professionals, including three C++ developers, a technical lead, an analyst, and a project manager. This team structure was designed to provide the necessary expertise to establish the system’s foundation.
The Data Hub system is now co-developed by Neontri and PKO Bank Polski. The cooperation process is characterized by flexibility and scalability, allowing for efficient adaptation to the client’s evolving needs. From Neontri’s side, the core development unit currently includes two C++ developers and a project manager, who handle the system’s ongoing operations and maintenance.
When new projects or features are introduced, additional developers with relevant experience are seamlessly integrated into the team. This approach allows for a quick ramp-up of resources when needed, ensuring the project is always optimally staffed to meet current objectives and challenges.
Results
The implementation of the Data Hub solution has yielded significant benefits for PKO Bank Polski, demonstrating its crucial role in the bank’s technological infrastructure:
- Enhanced efficiency. The system has successfully offloaded the burden from the bank’s core systems, achieving impressive processing speeds of up to 10,000 requests per second to meet high-volume demands.
- Operational resilience. The high-availability cluster, implemented across three data centers with six copies of each data point, ensures uninterrupted service, allowing the bank to maintain its operations during potential disruptions.
- Near-real-time data replication. The Data Hub’s architecture, primarily built on C++ with components in Python and Java, offers high-speed data processing and transformation, ensuring that any changes in the core banking system are reflected in offloading one as they occur.
- Smooth implementation. The Data Hub seamlessly integrates with the bank’s existing ecosystem, preserving compatibility while introducing advanced capabilities.
- Regulatory compliance. The solution has enabled PKO Bank Polski to meet increased regulatory requirements, particularly those stemming from PSD2.
