kompany delivers leading regulatory solutions 3X faster with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) modern lakehouse analytics

kompany enables their clients to automate and transform anti-money laundering compliance into competitive advantages. The OCI Lakehouse enabled them to accelerate their pace of innovation while decreasing costs 70%. Now, they can easily scale to ingest and understand more data while making better decisions from AI-powered predictions—without having to learn ML.

kompany is proud to be recognized as the first organization to build a global real-time network of commercial and government registers. It’s the leading regulatory technology (RegTech) platform for Global Business Verification, Know Your Customer (KYC), Know Your Business (KYB), and anti-money-laundering compliance. Based in Vienna, Austria, kompany is a government-licensed clearing house and official distributor for commercial registers globally. The team includes 75 professionals and the firm has offices in Vienna, London, New York, and Singapore. In February 2022, kompany was acquired by Moody’s Corporation.

Compliance teams don’t need to worry that the data they’re relying on is outdated and potentially inaccurate because the kompany network connects to commercial registers, financial authorities, and tax offices around the world in real time. kompany believes that seamless access to data from reliable, official sources is not only key to fulfilling the regulatory compliance requirements of their clients, but fundamental to providing the data and analytics needed to achieve competitive advantage.

kompany’s advanced APIs and collaborative, web-based KYC workspace application provide the automation and tools required for audit-proof compliance. They aggregate real-time access instead of aggregating data, enabling customers to deliver truth and not just trust. This gives kompany’s customers what they need to satisfy the strictest due diligence requirements of the latest anti-money laundering legislation.

kompany and its goals

kompany was looking for an easy-to-use, next generation data lakehouse to automate process flows for data ingestion from a wide range of sources quickly and efficiently. kompany had the following goals for their modern lakehouse analytics project:

• Deliver a simple, automated process from data extract, transform, and load (ETL) to presentation with unlimited scalability.
• Ingest data from multiple sources, transform, enrich, and load into an open, unified data platform to create a single source of truth.
• Query the data platform and deliver innovative compliance analytics to their customers.
• Save operational costs and reduce time to deliver with end-to-end automation.

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure services used

The project was built using cloud native principles because kompany was looking for a well-integrated solution where all processes can be built on a next-generation data lakehouse platform. kompany leveraged the following Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) services:

• OCI Data Integration: A fully managed, multi-tenant service that helps data engineers and ETL developers accelerate data science and analytics projects with a no-code dataflow designer for configuring integration parameters and automating data mappings. Visual designers simplify common ETL tasks, such as ingesting data from various data assets, cleansing, transforming, and reshaping that data, and efficiently loading it to target data assets.
• Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse: A fully automated cloud database service optimized for analytic workloads, including data marts, data warehouses, and data lakes. It is preconfigured with columnar format, partitioning, and large joins to simplify and accelerate database provisioning, extracting, loading, and transforming data; running sophisticated reports; generating predictions; and creating machine learning models.
• Oracle Analytics Cloud: A cloud native service that provides the capabilities required to address the entire analytics process from data ingestion and modeling, through data preparation and enrichment, to visualization and collaboration without compromising security and governance. Embedded machine learning and natural language processing technologies help increase productivity and build an analytics-driven culture in organizations.
• Oracle Object Storage: A cloud service that enables customers to securely store any type of data in its native format. With built-in redundancy, OCI Object Storage is ideal for building modern applications that require scale and flexibility, as it can be used to consolidate multiple data sources for analytics, backup, or archive purposes.
• Oracle Identity and Access Management (IAM): A cloud native platform including authentication, single sign-on (SSO), and identity lifecycle management. Oracle IAM helps administrators control who has access to cloud resources, what type of access a group of users has, and to which specific resources.

kompany’s modern lakehouse analytics solution uses Autonomous Data Warehouse as the single source of truth and OCI Data Integration to transform, enrich, and load source data from Object Storage. Their financial department leverages Oracle Analytics Cloud to access and process relevant data, evaluate predictions, and make quick, accurate decisions.

The Oracle solution

To achieve its goals, kompany implemented a cloud native solution on OCI. It’s a next-generation data lakehouse complete with a data warehouse, data integration, data lake, and modern analytic services. They can now load any type of data from a wide range of sources, store it in their data warehouse or data lake, and leverage easy to use automation to transform, visualize, and analyze it from a single source of truth.

OCI Data Integration data flows and pipelines made it easy for data analysts to connect and transform data from multiple sources. With OCI Data Integration’s no-code designers, ADW’s automation, and self-service analytics, kompany was able to save 70% over traditional approaches. In fact, their single data analyst was able to begin performing tasks in an hour with no prior knowledge of the service. Additionally, the ease of use and automation of their modern lakehouse analytics solution meant that kompany didn’t have to engage outside consultants.

All components of their modern data platform scale automatically, removing the need for kompany to manually manage their on-premises infrastructure. Using their next-generation lakehouse analytics solution, kompany now delivers more innovative compliance offerings 3X faster. Their business experts also gain new insights using AI-powered augmented analytics from Oracle Analytics Cloud along with machine learning and natural language processing technologies.

Visually define and automate data pipelines from source applications to analytics and ML modeling.

Technical implementation on OCI

A successful proof of concept (POC) with Oracle’s presales team resulted in a rapid transfer of knowledge that helped kompany to quickly transition into a support-based, continuous innovation process. After the POC, kompany successfully developed their own data integration flows, with the Oracle team as their partner for guidance and technical support.

kompany went live with their first integration flows and reports within two weeks. Easy-to-use OCI Data Integration functions and expressions combined with self-service analytics from Oracle Analytics Cloud helped them cut their time to deliver new financial insights from days to hours.

kompany’s modern data lakehouse on OCI leverages the following capabilities:

• Load data from SaaS applications (Recurly and 3scale) into Oracle Object Storage. Recurly is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution used to simplify their billing processes. 3scale is an API Management solution, used to set up pricing rules, issue invoices, and collect payments.
• OCI Data Integration is used to easily ingest, enrich, and transform source data which often involves complex logic and end-to-end automation.
• OCI Object Storage significantly reduced costs compared to their previous cloud provider, AWS, and provides a highly scalable source for unstructured and semi-structured data movement, transformation, enrichment, and ingestion into ADW.
• The data analyst uses the no-code, visual designer to quickly define data flows. Data integration flows and pipelines that once took days to deliver, can now be created in under an hour, depending on the complexity of the transformations.
• To maintain the data flow and pipeline logic as source and target schemas change over time, OCI Data Integration’s refreshing-entities functionality is used. This automation minimizes maintenance overhead by keeping source and target schemas current.
• Tables are created on Autonomous Data Warehouse and the enriched, transformed data of all types are quickly ingested into those tables.
• Transformed data is explored and analyzed using Oracle Analytics Cloud. Data analysts and business experts define their own dashboards in minutes with self-service capabilities.

kompany’s end-to-end data pipeline architecture cut costs 70% and delivered new analytics 3X faster.

Results

With their modern lakehouse analytics solution, kompany is now able to automate their data pipeline without coding by using OCI Data Integration, enabling their financial experts to deliver ML-driven insights on their own with Oracle Analytics Cloud. Their data analyst found the cloud-native ETL services easy to use, troubleshoot, and maintain with no prior experience. Data analysts and business experts alike are creating new analytics in minutes and providing meaningful insights to their boards of directors for better financial decisions.

The simplicity of using an end-to-end lakehouse including Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse and OCI Data Integration has helped kompany reduce operational costs by removing the need to extend their technical team. Based on their success to date, they plan to triple the number of users deployed in OCI by the end of this year.

According to Georg Ursits, head of development at kompany, ”Oracle delivered a fully integrated environment of ETL and analytics that bridged gaps between loosely coupled components. With our modern lakehouse analytics, we were able to cut costs by 70% and achieve a 2X return on investment within 12 months.”

Next Steps

kompany currently runs six integration workflows to provide financial analytics. Based on their success to date, they plan to expand their usage to seven other departments including HR and Sales.

kompany continues to use the full range of OCI technologies including infrastructure-as-code (IAC) through Terraform to augment and extend geographical coverage to ensure reliable access to its globally distributed data network. They have found that a fully integrated data lakehouse platform using Object Storage, Autonomous Data Warehouse, OCI Data Integration, and Oracle Analytics Cloud, offers 3X time savings for their team, which they pass on to their clients.

Going forward, kompany intends to further integrate in-house business intelligence reporting with open source data management tools and prebuilt OCI resources including AI Services, Data Catalog, and Data Flow.

OCI Resources

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