Unlocking the potential of social banking to the underserved
Faster time to insights
Increase in data volumes to train ML models
Faster experimentation for social banking models
Access to banking and lending services is a cornerstone of economic empowerment, fostering financial inclusion and propelling societal progress. In Thailand, where the underserved segments of the population often lack the traditional access to these services, KASIKORN LINE’s pioneering service — LINE BK, Thailand’s first social bank — stands as a beacon of change. Dealing with vast volumes of social and financial data, KASIKORN LINE encountered challenges in managing data silos, diverse sources and real-time credit decision-making. Their lean team required a scalable and integrated platform to unlock insights, drive financial inclusion and serve their customers effectively. With the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform, they have developed a unique credit scoring model that combines conventional financial data with behavioral information to provide accessible financial services, catering to the underbanked and unbanked population — ushering in a new world of greater economic participation and prosperity.
The pursuit of actionable insights amidst vast data challenges
Through their innovative approach of embedding financial offerings within the LINE messaging app, KASIKORN LINE is not only redefining the landscape of banking but also bridging the gap for those who were previously excluded from the financial system. This visionary partnership between KASIKORNBANK and LINE is empowering individuals, providing them with newfound access to financial services and catalyzing a transformative journey toward greater economic participation and prosperity. “Our vision is to democratize banking, ensuring that every individual, regardless of their financial history, gains access to tailored financial solutions,” explained Dr. Thee Chanyaswad, Head of Data Analytics at KASIKORN LINE.
They planned to provide financial opportunities previously inaccessible based solely on traditional credit history. They are able to evaluate creditworthiness better than the traditional financial institution by leveraging non-private alternative data from LINE, removing the inherent institutional barriers that are in place to help users perform actions such as opening bank accounts, conducting money transfers and accessing lending products. However, their ability to execute against their vision was impeded by substantial data challenges driven by their dynamic social banking model. Analyzing this extensive data set to cater to their entire customer base necessitated a scalable data platform capable of handling their ambitious goals.
“As a lean team, the massive volumes of data we dealt with made it crucial to have a scalable and integrated platform for analytics and AI,” said Dr. Chanyaswad. “The urgency lay in unlocking actionable insights from our diverse data sources, serving our customers better and driving financial inclusion.”
The need for scalable data solutions to analyze their entire customer population was evident. Their legacy systems provided valuable lessons, but the ambitious scope of their credit scoring and lending endeavors required a more sophisticated platform that unified their data and accelerated their ability to innovate with AI.
Pioneering financial inclusion with lakehouse architecture
The adoption of the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform marked a turning point for KASIKORN LINE’s data operations. “The concept of a lakehouse, which seamlessly unifies data with analytics and machine learning, resonated profoundly with our vision,” said Dr. Chanyaswad. “It’s given us the means to transition from fragmented data silos to a unified system that brings together all our data with BI analytics, reporting and robust ML capabilities.”
A decisive factor in KASIKORN LINE’s selection of the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform was the platform’s ability to foster cross-team collaboration. It’s helped various teams from different countries work together on the same data with powerful dashboards for financial analysis, portfolio management, risk management and business performance. Diving into the various components of the platform, Delta Lake has emerged as a cornerstone, enhancing data pipeline reliability while significantly reducing latency. This enhanced data infrastructure forms the backbone of their analytics capabilities, enabling them to serve their customers with agility and accuracy.
The power of Databricks SQL has revolutionized how they access and analyze data, allowing them to run ad hoc queries with ease and precision. This agility in querying empowers their data teams to derive actionable insights swiftly, a crucial advantage in the fast-paced world of social banking. Furthermore, Unity Catalog plays a pivotal role in their data governance and access control strategy. It has offered teams secured access to the right data with granular precision which provides peace of mind that sensitive financial information remains securely protected.
Dr. Chanyaswad affirms, “Databricks Data Intelligence Platform has provided us with the tools to harness the power of data to drive our business forward. The impact on productivity and innovation has been remarkable.”
Elevating financial inclusion for everyone
The adoption of the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform at KASIKORN LINE has yielded a profound business impact, amplifying their productivity and performance across the board. Prior to Databricks, complex data analysis often consumed hours due to the time-intensive nature of querying vast data sets. However, with Databricks, access times have been dramatically reduced to mere minutes, even seconds, ushering in a paradigm shift in their data-driven decision-making process. This consolidation of data analysis within a single platform has slashed time to results by up to 60x, empowering their teams to swiftly translate data into actionable insights.
Furthermore, Databricks has ushered in a new era of scalability and performance for KASIKORN LINE. As they now explore more advanced use cases with ML, they are exploring the development of more comprehensive models more efficiently. By accelerating iterations of machine learning experiments, Databricks has enabled KASIKORN LINE to scale data volumes to train ML models by 2 to 5x and accelerate experimentation for their models by up to 2x.
Looking ahead, KASIKORN LINE envisions a continued journey of innovation, democratizing data across the organization, from marketing to sales, and leveraging Databricks’ cutting-edge features to foster a customer-centric approach. As KASIKORN LINE reshapes Thailand’s financial landscape, the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform remains at the heart of its data-driven transformation, paving the way for new heights of social banking excellence.
