Scaling large data operations was a hot topic at Fivetran’s recent Modern Data Stack Event series in London. A community of data leaders from some of the largest enterprises converged to share real-world experiences of adopting modern data infrastructures and practices that are enabling faster insights, improving customer experiences and driving business growth. 

We heard from some of Europe’s leading enterprises, BBC Studios and Monzo Bank, who shared how they tackle complex challenges and drive data movement within their organizations. Here are highlights from their presentations.

Breaking silos, delivering growth at BBC Studios

BBC Studios is a commercial subsidiary of the BBC. It is based around two operational areas – a global content studio and the channels and streaming business – and has an ambition to double the size of the 2022 business by 2028. According to Ross Gaskell, Manager of Commercial Data Technology at BBC Studios, data is at the heart of its success.

Part of the business’ growth plans include the recent acquisition of global streaming service BritBox International. Gaskell highlighted a key post-merger data challenge for BBC Studios: diverse, siloed data systems that hindered ad performance analysis and limited insights. Unable to merge customer data between systems, they faced labor-intensive manual processes with Excel. Existing data operations also weren’t suited toward cross-organization technical needs.

Gaskell brought in Fivetran to overcome data silos and unlock rich customer insights. With Fivetran, they build and segment audiences, enabling targeted advertising without third-party cookies. Additionally, Fivetran’s built-in governance capabilities ensured that Gaskell’s lean team wasn’t burdened with manual governance tracking and management.

“Fivetran is at the core for our enterprise data sources,” shares Gaskell. “We’re now able to manage data and power our business. Fivetran has brought in revenue data sets so that we can understand our advertising performance with different audiences.”

The team built a new portal that democratized data for analysts. They launched within two months, with tremendous results. “We now have 3 billion records in our data platform with 156 million active rows coming in via Fivetran,” Gaskell adds.

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Data-driven, multi-channel hypergrowth at Monzo Bank

Since launching in 2015, Monzo Bank has gained over 9 million personal and 400,000 business banking users in the UK. It continuously optimizes marketing strategies across multiple platforms to attract new customers, experimenting with new formats like the custom Spotify Wrapped campaign called “Year in Monzo.” These campaigns are highly successful, drawing millions of visitors per month.

Pan Hu, Senior Data Scientist at Monzo, leads a performance marketing team that tests creative messages across platforms. Her budget allocations depend on near real-time response to engagement metrics, from time of day to customer demographics. Her team’s success hinges on understanding attribution pathways and campaign performance. 

The variety and number of data sources meant Hu’s team was performing manual data ingestion and reporting. They aggregated data from Apple’s and Google’s app stores, a web analytics platform and a mobile measurement platform (MMP). The ingestion of data was, in Hu’s words, “exhausting.” They needed an automated, sustainable way to do their work.

Usama Hafeez, Senior Data Analyst at Monzo, and Hu chose Fivetran to connect ad and marketing platforms for a reliable single source of truth. This freed their teams from juggling APIs for individual data sources, allowing them to easily explore new avenues for advertising and evaluate campaign performance in near real-time. Using dbt-based models, they can connect new sources to their warehouse without waiting for engineering support.

Now, the Monzo team can track last-click attribution and truly understand business insights. All data feeds into a Looker dashboard, enabling complex calculations and identifying missing demographic data. Thanks to a modern data stack, there is no single point of failure and they can adjust and deduplicate data as needed.

Hafeez shares, “Fivetran makes it very easy to explore new avenues for advertising. We can quickly set up ads in new places and receive data straight into our warehouse, already modeled and enriched. It alerts us when things fail or if there’s a delay. Fivetran simplifies everything.”

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