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Enabling consumers to compare financial products simply and quickly

“We have integrated Talend into our cloud strategy to drive faster quote times and offer our customers an improved path to purchase.

CA S E S T U DY

INDUSTRY

• Finance & Insurance

INFORMATION• HQ: UK

• 11-50 employees

USE CASE• Customer experience

CHALLENGE• In a drive to create a personalised consumer multi-channel experience

TALEND PRODUCT USED • Talend Data Management (Talend Data Integration AWS and Talend Data Quality)

RESULTS

• Improved path to purchase for consumers with better product comparison tools on the MSM website

• Finance and Marketing daily reporting metrics enable MSM to forecast channel performance

• Data mining and data science using up to 11TB of data enables teams to perform ad hoc data analysis

”Ian Edwards, Data Warehouse Technical Product Owner, MoneySuperMarket.

MoneySuperMarket.com (MSM) is the UK’s leading price-comparison website. Its online service enables consumers to compare financial products simply and quickly. MSM strives to help consumers make prudent financial choices and switch to better-value products than those the consumer is already using. In 2015, the company achieved revenues of £281.7 million for the full year.

The MSM website covers a wide range of products, including car, home, and life insurance as well as financial products such as credit cards, loans and mortgages. It also includes home services such as energy, broadband and mobile. The company’s TravelSuperMarket (TSM) brand primarily offers price comparisons for holidays, car rental, flights, and primarily, hotels.

MSM collects data on offers and presents it to consumers on a single site so that they can quickly compare different offerings and deals and click through to make purchases.

In a drive to create a personalised consumer multi-channel experienceMSM began to embark on a journey of IT transformation in order to drive customer experience and conversion through their website. Talend is a part of a wider strategy to adopt innovative, agile technologies in a drive to create a personalised consumer multi-channel experience. The business was looking to drive faster quote times and an improved path to purchase for consumers to drive efficiencies in the e-commerce channel. Data integration was a critical part of this process as information is driven from a variety of formats and sources in order to optimise the front-end experience for MSM customers. Understanding and optimising consumer experience will also enable marketing efficiencies across the business as MSM moves towards more personalised and relevant content for each customer.

According to Ian Edwards, Data Warehouse Technical Product Owner for MSM, the company

is using Talend and other custom-built software in the data warehouse group to automate data integration workflows and build an enterprise data warehouse. MSM uses Talend to get data from several web services into data warehouses for consumption by its various departments, such as finance, marketing and business intelligence, and for market intelligence reporting. MSM is also using Talend as the interface between those web services and cloud-hosted column store databases for Moneysupermarket and TravelSuperMarket.

MSM is currently using Talend Data Management, with ETL and Data Quality functionality; and a hybrid data warehousing architecture relying on cloud databases. To build the application, MSM will aggregate data from different product listings that it collects from various sources to allow consumers to compare offers across a market, and to get unique insights into what kinds of offers are most compelling.

“Other tasks will coordinate aggregations and potentially use Talend from the other side of the data warehouse to feed specific systems, such as a new CRM system expected to be operational later this year,” says Edwards. “We will use a mix of Talend ETL and in-memory database capabilities in that space. We’re scheduling it via an open-source job scheduler to give us the independence to leverage several database technologies, and we’re integrating that functionality through the Talend Administration Center to schedule Talend tasks and jobs.”

Building a cloud infrastructureThe goal of adopting a cloud infrastructure is to create an agile and innovative organisation that can rapidly spin up and spin down environments to analyse the varying volume of data sets that exist throughout the peaks of daily transactions. “We chose to move to a cloud-based model because of the flexibility it can provide for new launches, new markets, scaling, disaster recovery, and more,” says Edwards.

“Where we end up in the long term, whether it is hybrid or fully cloud, still gives us that flexibility to grow as a business.”

In MSM’s cloud infrastructure, the company uses a universal cloud management tool to get the ability to deploy to any cloud provider. For MSM, that provider is currently Amazon Web Services (AWS). Regarding software configuration, the company uses open-source configuration management tools to install and configure the Talend software, which runs on AWS EC2 instances. Like many other businesses, MSM is looking to leverage the capacity of Amazon Web Services to reduce cost and drive agility through their IT estate.

MSM also uses Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) to manage the configuration database, anduses S3 as a transfer mechanism from legacy databases and between Amazon Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs) for anything the company wants to store. The resiliency of RDS is used to run database support tools such as Talend Administration Center (TAC) and scheduler console. MSM uses the command line from the scheduler to execute jobs within TAC.

Comparing data on financial products across a market and selecting most compelling offersEdward says the technology stack from website, services, and data layers, is in transition to being all cloud based, and uses fully-automated and rebuildable servers running open-source technologies as well as several proprietary versions of other technologies that enable MSM to have failover, disaster recovery, and upgrade capabilities through automated rebuild. The company uses a leading data visualization tool for business intelligence, which is also built on a rebuildable infrastructure.

Data from the source systems, which include several legacy relational databases, goes into a staging area, where the interfaces going forward are JSON-based events. “We tend to stage things only transiently—just for a specific data run or in some cases for a few days,” says Edwards. “Then we move data into the raw data store in our columnar database. The process is very similar in TravelSuperMarket, except that it uses open-source message queues rather than a web service. In that process, there is some streaming of JSON contracts that are then aggregated and sent through a hub, which is connected to several data marts.”

Dashboards created from the datasets include daily reporting metrics answering such questions as: How many visitors and click-throughs did the car insurance site get? What devices were those visitors using? What are our conversion

metrics? “We use those metrics to assess and forecast channel performance,” says Edwards. In addition, MSM will use Talend to feed the data mart that supports its marketing tool.”

In the area of data mining and data science, MSM is using leading open-source analytics to pull data directly from the column store database, and can scale it to 11TB of data. It will enable teams to perform modeling and mining and other tasks that require ad hoc data analysis. “We will be using data science to segment our customers and analyze market share according to demographics,” says Edwards. “We will also start using the insights we get to shape our site, especially now that we do more targeted presentations, through email, CRM or onsite presentations of the ‘next-best product.”

MSM also does market analysis for providers and makes available to them insights as to how they are performing on the MSM sites.

Regarding future development, MSM is looking at clickstream data and analysis. Another possibility is doing a more dynamic analysis of data, using a sandbox approach to increase speed to market of the value of data.

Why Talend?The licensing models that the legacy ETL tools MSM was using did not fit with the company’s cloud strategy going forward, especially given that the company wouldn’t be able to automate servers the way it wanted and would have limited flexibility in the number of servers it could deploy. “Talend’s developer-based licensing model works really well in cloud environments and supports rapid scaling,” says Edwards.

“It essentially became a business challenge to find the technology that best matched the principles our CTO had established for being able to automate our technology in a cloud-agnostic, cost-efficient way. When we considered that requirement, and added the other capabilities we might want, it narrowed the field of possible software solutions dramatically. TravelSuperMarket was already using Talend successfully, and we realized it also met our needs. In addition, it’s Java-based, as are the other technologies we’re using for services, so we saw a beneficial overlap there of knowledge and skills within the Linux and Java space,” adds Edwards.

MSM decided to go with the enterprise version of Talend because the company saw value in TAC elements and code deployment elements that would be useful in data integration projects. MSM also felt the ability to add execution servers underneath the TAC fit well with their plans for scaling.

“There were very few tools that actually met all of our criteria, and of those, Talend had the greatest breadth of capability for what we needed and where we might go,” says Edwards. “From a development perspective, Talend does what we need, and it helps keep maintenance and support simple. It has also provided good value in terms of the cost for our initiatives around continuous integration, code management, and the ability to scale easily.”

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