Google Cloud Announces Next Step in Partnership With Major UK Bank to Build Integrated Data Analytics Hub

Digital banks, or challenger banks, are becoming an ever more prominent feature of the financial landscape, particularly in the UK. Strictly digital, they use apps and online platforms to support their customers. Digital banks have an advantage in that they don’t rely on legacy systems.

This allows them to be nimble, innovate at speed, and more proactive than many traditional banks. Monzo is now one of the most popular digital banks in the UK, with over 9 million customers, making it the seventh largest bank in the UK by customer numbers. The bank has been working with Google Cloud to create and shape a data analytics hub that can help it grow with its customers and create better customer experiences.

“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,” says 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.”

Building a high-performance data analysis hub

Monzo has been working with Google Cloud since the bank was founded in 2015, and was one of the first banks in the UK to be 100% cloud-based. The bank is multi-cloud, and Google Cloud has been integral in building its data analysis hub, helping to provide the bank with data that can empower all of its teams to get the insights that can drive better business decisions. BigQuery, for example, is a serverless and cost-effective enterprise data warehouse that is helping Monzo store, access, and utilize data.

“We empower all of our engineers and all of our technical staff with BigQuery data across the organization,” says Patel. “We leverage BigQuery’s scale and capabilities to run complex pipelines and data modeling to surface detailed customer and business insights.”

The company also uses Looker on top of BigQuery to access, analyze, and act on the most up-to-date multiple terabyte data sets in minutes, and it’s helping the bank get access to a wide range of business insights. Whether it’s helping track key goals for the bank’s diversity and inclusion program or tracking profitability, all of this data is being served on top of BigQuery. This aggregated data is then made accessible across the bank.

The bank has nearly 19 petabytes of data in BigQuery and more than 2,000 data models across its BigQuery estate. The internal and external insights Monzo gets from BigQuery also allow the bank to develop its customer-facing features, such as how it provides lending facilities to customers.

“With BigQuery we can have all the data we need to effectively make business-critical decisions, and analyze the impact of complex incidents when something goes wrong. For us, this is like having a superpower,” says Patel.

Utilizing the power of AI to create better customer experiences

With all this data, Monzo is able to build powerful machine learning (ML) models to improve its services in a variety of ways, such as helping to protect customers from fraudsters. Monzo also uses ML models across different borrowing products and contexts, which are the key drivers of their lending decisions, from accepting credit applications to setting credit limits and interest rates.

As Monzo continues to grow, the bank 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 its ML models, the bank analyzes 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.

Supporting the safeguarding of customer data

Monzo worked very closely with Google Cloud and the banking regulators to effectively build a disaster recovery program where its data is being continuously synced between another cloud platform and Google Cloud. This allows 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.

The work with Google Cloud team also supports Monzo’s ongoing efforts when it comes to navigating the complicated and ever-changing world of banking regulations, both in the UK and abroad. This expertise helps Monzo build customer confidence. “As Google Cloud team operates both within the UK and across other markets, their geographical reach is a key strategic advantage which aligns with our global ambition” says Patel.

Redefining banking for the 21st century

Monzo continues its impressive growth and should secure another £500 million in funding from investors, which could push its valuation to £4.1 billion. And it will continue to work with Google Cloud as it cements its place in the global banking landscape. “We have grown with Google Cloud and we can integrate our data with its other solutions,,” says Patel. “By being on top of Google Cloud, we’re prepared to bring more products and continue growing in the UK and beyond.”