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Creating a culture that values data governance areeba is a financial technology company that aims to improve businesses by providing smarter, faster and seamless payment solutions for banks, merchants, governments and individuals. areeba is fully regulated and licensed as a financial institution by the Central Bank of Lebanon. It is a principal member of the Mastercard and Visa network, and has a strategic partnership with American Express. areeba’s headquarters are in Beirut, and the company has a presence in Jordan, Egypt, with future expansion plan in Qatar, Iraq and Saudi Arabia.

Elie Soukayem, Director of Data Analytics, explains: “As the biggest acquirer in Lebanon, we provide state of the art payment services to our clients, with unparalleled and exclusive benefits. We believe that switching to cashless would benefit both the merchants and the end-consumers, from a convenience and a security point of view, and we have a major role to play in boosting the cashless payment industry. We fulfill this objective by providing secure and reliable tools so that merchants develop their business locally and regionally.”

As areeba’s Director of Data Analytics, Elie Soukayem plays a leading role in the company’s digital transformation so that areeba can offer its customers a robust and secure platform for credit card management.

Building an enterprise data lake and enabling data governance“Our challenge was to embrace data transformation through a data platform that maintains high data quality and enables data to be transformed for insights and innovation all while maintaining data governance,” explains Soukayem. “To do this, we had to bring every areeba employee around to the idea that data is a critical component of any innovation and that

data governance is the responsibility of all employees. We also had to implement the right data governance policies and enable them to be applied by employees in a very easy way. Thankfully, we had a strong sponsorship from our CEO.”

To create a data culture, Soukayem started building a data team from scratch. At areeba, the IT department handles operations and data sources. Under its umbrella, the data team oversees data lifecycle management, data governance, and compliance.

In addition to building the data team, Soukayem needed an API-enabled data platform able to acquire any incoming data—such as business data and economic indicators—and connect them together. This data platform had to work with its legacy systems and provide the data governance mandated by GDPR, the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), the company’s credit card partners, and the Central Bank of Lebanon (BDL).

“We had both structured and unstructured data. The data lake and Talend quickly became key components of that equation,” says Soukayem.

Why Talend?Talend was recommended to Soukayem by a former colleague and he was impressed with Talend’s complete offering. After evaluating several solutions, areeba chose Talend because it provided a comprehensive solution from data ingestion to data governance and easy integration with any system. The company uses Talend Data Integration to ingest data into its data lake and Talend Data Catalog, Talend Data Quality, Talend Data Stewardship, and Talend Data Preparation for data governance.Soukayem says. “In addition, Talend enables

“As a financial technology company, we have particular needs for data governance due to the nature of the data we hold. Talend is pivotal in helping us stay compliant and develop new customer services.

CA S E S T U DY

INDUSTRY

• Finance/Banking

INFORMATION• HQ: Lebanon

• 51-200 employees

USE CASES• Risk and fraud management

• Anti-money laundering (AML)

• Sales and marketing efficiency

• Compliance and regulations

CHALLENGE• Building an enterprise data lake and enabling data governance

TALEND PRODUCT USED • Talend Data Fabric: - Talend Data Integration - Talend Data Catalog - Talend Data Quality - Talend Data Stewardship - Talend Data Preparation

RESULTS• Enabled a 500 GB data lake, with one or two GB transferred or ingested daily

• Provided the ability to ingest data everyfiveortenseconds for fraud monitoring

• Provided data governance for compliance with industry rules and regulations

”Elie Soukayem, Director of Data Analytics, areeba.

us to apply rules throughout the data governance process—from data preparation to stewardship —and to apply these rules beyond the data team. Talend can also be integrated with any pipeline or ingestion. These are the major advantages we saw in Talend.”

Bernard Bardawil, Development Lead and  Technology Architect at areeba, adds, “By design, Talend solutions and specifically Talend Data Integration are based on Java and Eclipse which allows it to be deployed and run on multiple operations and gives an ultimate scalability and extensibility since we can customize any needed connection and integration simply by adding the related libraries.”

areeba uses Talend Data Integration to ingest sources including Oracle database, MariaDB, SQL, Hadoop clusters, Informix, SAP Hana, and Excel files into its data lake. The data lake is made up of three data repositories with a virtualization layer on top. Currently the data lake holds 500 GB with one or two GB transferred or ingested daily.

Soukayem explains: “We have to combine information coming from different systems. With Talend Data Quality, areeba can apply automatic rules to clean the data which will eventually sit in the data lake. Along the way, we are heavily using Talend Data Preparation to standardize our data, for example city name, merchant names or regions.”

Business teams in each department have the ownership of their data and areeba established data stewards to access the data management platform. Soukayem continues: “Curation tasks are assigned to these data stewards across the organization and tracked for progress or audit. Notifications are sent via emails. Our data stewards do not have to go to the data steward console every day to check if something went wrong with data ingestion. This makes it easy for any business team to clean, certify, and reconcile their data and this does not take much time.”

Talend Data Catalog automatically crawls data in the data lake, then profiles and classifies it, automatically finding and suggesting relationships between data. It then provides search-based access for quick retrieval. This provides all employees the ability to easily find and understand their data.

“Talend has not only helped areeba to handle its data governance responsibilities, but also to spread this data culture in the enterprise, improving the chance of success for any data governance program,” Soukayem says.

Developing customer-facing applications and monetizing dataThe data lake provides a single source of truth for data and is used for projects developed for internal use as the Anti-Money Laundering (AML) or for external use exposed to clients as the Merchant Portal or the Youth App.

Internally, the data team has created a self-service layer, which enables data analysts to build business performance dashboards for executive and finance teams. In addition, using machine learning, Hive, and Python, data scientists can also predict customer behaviors such as customer churn or customer retention. This helps the Merchant Solution Unit to build targeted campaigns for merchants in order to retain them.

By building an external layer for banks, merchants, and governments, areeba is innovating for its clients to help them grow their business. This new governed data lake, powered by Talend, is designed to help banks, merchants and governments optimize their card business strategy and maximize their revenues.

For example, areeba has created the ability to perform real-time, online fraud monitoring. Talend ingests data every five or ten seconds from the authorizations it receives on cards and uses machine learning code on the transaction to prevent fraud.

Another external-facing application is for Anti-Money Laundering (AML). Regulations have evolved and become more complex, costly, and difficult to comply with. Talend helps ingest massive volumes of data that are analyzed to detect bad actors, bribery, corruption and tax evasion, for example.

Soukayem concludes: “Talend has enabled us to become a company that values data. Since we can access all types of data sources, with speed and trust, we have been able to build a proper data lake for agile application development.”

“Putting in place a data lake with Talend, API, and governance rules was a key element for areeba to succeed.”

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