Data is at the heart of Bank of Georgia’s operations, informing everything from its customer relations to product development. Using Cloudera to bring multiple data sources into one centralised location, the bank can provide intelligent and personalised customer experiences and effectively utilise data to drive innovation.

Bank of Georgia is the first bank from the Caucasus region to receive a premium listing on the London Stock Exchange. It is one of the largest employers in Georgia, supporting customers’ loan portfolios, deposits, assets, and stocks and shares. Today, Bank of Georgia has more than 1.5 million monthly active digital users, and up to 99% of all transactions are conducted through remote channels.

Centralising data and tools to facilitate growth

As Bank of Georgia has grown, the volume of customer and financial data that it manages has increased significantly. It has also expanded its use of open source tools across its analytics, data management, and developer functions. 

The bank recognised it needed to centralise and integrate its data into a single location to streamline operations, accelerate product development, and support advanced analytics. Robust security was also critical to meet regulatory requirements and data privacy mandates. With a DataOps team of only four, the bank needed a platform that required less of their time and resources to build and manage integrations with its current technology environment.

An intelligent and flexible platform

Cloudera alongside its local implementation partner, HTS, worked together with Bank of Georgia to implement Cloudera as a central platform for the bank’s customer and financial data. The bank now has a centralised open data lakehouse that can scale rapidly to integrate data from multiple sources. This includes significant volumes of data from Bank of Georgia’s digital platforms, with 1.4 million monthly active digital users and 66% of all transactions conducted through its banking applications.

Cloudera’s out-of-the-box functionality simplified numerous complex integrations with Bank of Georgia’s existing toolset. The bank previously used more than 15 open source products for data streaming from databases, including Oracle, Elastic Search and MongoDB, and for Extract, Transform and Load (ELT) processes. Cloudera’s open architecture and interoperability meant that Bank of Georgia’s team did not have to spend time manually building data pipelines or integrations, and they now stream data into the lakehouse with Apache Spark.

“Cloudera’s out-of-the-box capabilities take integration pressure off our teams because it is truly integrated from a data security and governance perspective. The simplicity and speed of set-up lets us focus on adding value by serving data to the rest of the business.” Vazha Pirtskhalaishvili, Head of DevOps and DataOps Engineering, Bank of Georgia.

Data accessibility drives new product development 

With a modern data architecture, Bank of Georgia has much greater accessibility to its information assets. The DataOps team now serves data on demand to more than 80 line-of-business users. The open data lakehouse incorporates new data from multiple sources in real-time, ensuring the bank never misses important insights and enabling the team to perform advanced analytics with the most recent data. 

By unlocking the value of its customer and financial data, Bank of Georgia has been able to develop many new use cases, including:

• A 360-degree view of its customers for deeper insight into their behaviour
• Powering personalized offers and services to customers
• Making better product recommendations to customers across all its channels

“Cloudera has provided us with modern data architecture that will support our continued growth – ensuring that we remain a data-driven businesses and delivering a foundation for future innovation.” Vazha Mantua, IT Director/Core IT & Data, Bank of Georgia.