Google Cloud has revealed how it has worked with UK digital bank Monzo, to create a data analytics hub that enhances customer experiences, and enables it to grow with its customers.
Monzo has been working with Google Cloud since it was founded in 2015, and was one of the first banks in the UK to be 100 per cent cloud-based. Google Cloud explained it has played an important role in building the bank’s data analysis hub, helping to provide the bank it data that can empower all of its teams to get the insights that can drive better business decisions.
“We generate a lot of data on our back end and also on our front end, from our systems, services, and our customers using the app,” explained Suhail Patel, senior staff engineer at Monzo. “We use that in a multitude of ways, for example, to provide better customer support by sharing insights with customers about how they’re spending their money.”
Monzo uses BigQuery, a serverless enterprise data warehouse to help it store, access, and utilise data. “We empower all of our engineers and all of our technical staff with BigQuery data across the organisation,” added Patel. “We leverage BigQuery’s scale and capabilities to run complex pipelines and data modelling to surface detailed customer and business insights.”
Monzo now boasts over nine million customers, making it the seventh-largest bank by customer numbers. Banks without any physical locations have been eating away at the traditionally big high street bank’s market share for years now, buoyed by the fact that they don’t rely on legacy systems.
The bank has nearly 19 petabytes of data in BigQuery and more than 2,000 data models across its BigQuery estate.
Building a bank for a new age
Monzo is using machine learning (ML) models in a number of ways. For example, it uses them to help protect customers from fraudsters, and across various borrowing products and contexts, which are key drivers of lending decisions, from accepting credit applications to setting credit limits and interest rates.
As it continues to grow, Monzo is using ML to develop its new experimental customer demand forecasting system. Monzo has already completed early experiments for predicting outcomes related to customer experience and auto-complete search queries.
To train these models, the bank analyses data sets like its support help articles on BigQuery using Vertex AI. This way, Monzo can test, build, and monitor ML models as it continues to refine and iterate on them.
Google Cloud also revealed that it has been working closely with Monzo and banking regulators to build a disaster recovery program where its data is being continuously synced between another cloud platform and Google Cloud. This enables Monzo to flip a switch and provide all of its important business services within a matter of seconds.
This backup platform, run on Google Cloud, means that customers can continue using all the important business services within Monzo if its primary platform were ever to go down. This is an online 24/7 disaster recovery capability that is continuously running, ready to take over in the event of failure of its other cloud provider. The bank also uses the disaster recovery program as a testbed for Google Kubernetes Engine, exploring what new features and capabilities it can build.
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