Rackspace Technology (NASDAQ: RXT), a global provider of managed cloud hosting services, has brought expanded Amazon Web Services (AWS) capabilities to M1 Finance, a Chicago-based online financial services company. This has helped M1 Finance accelerate fraud detection and enable real-time dynamic data querying through an “efficient” data pipeline.
M1 Finance offers an innovative money management application. It is aimed at intelligent investors seeking access to features such as automation, leverage investing and banking services, all wrapped into one integrated solution. The company’s platform has experienced significant growth, with over 200,000 accounts totaling approximately $2 billion in assets and counting. To ensure a secure user experience, M1 Finance aims to provide a seamless interface with robust security and fraud detection.
With its rapid user growth, M1 Finance found it was collecting a significantly higher volume of data from its internal systems than what could fit in its existing data warehouse. Handling such high data volumes could become costly with traditional data warehousing. The company also had Java applications that accumulated data over many years which could be highly useful for fraud analytics. This data was trapped in the silos of legacy databases.
Data Analytics
Onica, a Rackspace Technology company, provided a solution to query rapidly moving high volume data from the existing system.
“Onica’s team really went above and beyond in ideating and implementing the solution,” said Richard Whaling, Lead Data Engineer at M1 Finance. “A great degree of passion and craftsmanship was visible in the code style and design of the implementation, which is rare to find in these kinds of engagements and really awesome to work with.”
The new solution streamlined the process significantly, automating what was previously done manually over multiple hours to a practically real-time solution. The design of the solution would provide scalability, low cost, and integration with existing data sets. The solution would also offer flexibility. It helps replace the process of having to queue tasks for an engineer with one where data analysts can perform ad hoc dynamic queries.
“Intelligent investors will benefit greatly from the data analytics advances M1 Finance has made to accelerate its secure processing of highly sensitive data,” said Tolga Tarhan, CTO of Rackspace Technology. “We’re proud to partner with M1 Finance to transition its legacy process and fully embrace intelligent automation capabilities, delivering the most streamlined customer experience through a near real-time solution.”
M1 Finance business users now can build “robust” queries at scale and address their multi-petabyte size data sources and return meaningful, timely results. This would provide a significant advantage in fraud detection where every minute reduced in processing time can mean proportionately higher success and improved security.
Google Cloud Migration
Rack space also announced it has supported gohenry with its global growth plans by migrating their IT environment to Google Cloud. This would help deliver enhanced security and scalability for this next-generation money app. gohenry offers a prepaid Visa debit card and app designed exclusively for 6-18-year-olds. The company now has one million customers, while achieving an annual turnover of £13 million in 2019.
As a premier partner for Google Cloud, with over 370+ technical certifications, Rackspace Technology supported gohenry throughout the entire migration process. gohenry is now leveraging several services within Google Cloud including Google Kubernetes Engine, Google Cloud Composer, Google Cloud Storage and BigQuery. Along with additional management tools like Terraform, which are allowing the company to manage its quality of services to be automatically scaled as required.
Experts from Rackspace Technology have provided gohenry with a custom multicloud environment – a hybrid set up which allows them to connect public cloud environment to private cloud to securely support their payments application. With around the clock monitoring, Rackspace Technology also ensures gohenry customers have full, secure service availability – particularly crucial given the need for data integrity of its young customers.
“16-18-year olds today are digital natives. According to our 2019 Youth Economy Report, they are choosing technology over cash and this trend will only become more prominent,” said Louise Hill, Co-founder and Chief Operating Officer at gohenry. “When it comes to the immediacy and availability of service, they just expect what they need to be there and working. Having a technology partner like Rackspace Technology is therefore vital to ensure our services are scalable, secure, and immediately available. Thanks to this partnership, we are confident that we can empower our young customers to be ambassadors of a new cashless society.”
