Digital-First Startups Have a Unique Path to Streaming Success

Is data streaming worth the learning curve—for practitioners, technical executives, and other business leaders? The response to this question is more than likely a resounding “Yes!” across multiple industries and business functions.

According to the 2023 Data Streaming Report , today’s IT leaders are seeing up to 10x returns on their investment in data streaming. Often, the further along that an organization is on its data streaming journey—across five key maturity levels—the more business value teams are able to extract from their data streaming use cases. 

While the majority (64%) are seeing a 2x to 5x return, some industries are further along than others. For example, 53% of surveyed FinServ leaders and 51% of technology leaders report seeing a 5x to 10x return.

We asked Jonathan Kropp , Director of Architecture at FinTech SaaS startup Extend , to get his perspective on the factors driving data streaming adoption across these two industries and what takeaways other technology leaders should be aware of.

What factors do you think are allowing companies like Extend to mature their data streaming adoption so rapidly and realize more business value? And what takeaways should other companies apply from this trend?

Jonathan: The biggest challenge and opportunity right now is combining systems together to communicate in real time. Anybody who considers their organization a technology company wants to strive toward that future—connecting all their systems together to create more real-time applications as opposed to relying on an hourly or nightly process.

Everyone has data everywhere. The challenge is connecting that data so you can react to events as they happen rather than having to wait for batch processing or on-demand commands to perform actions. How quickly you’re able to react has immediate implications for how much value that data is bringing to your business. 

For example, the way Extend onboards merchants to our platforms is done through systems outside of our core platform. With data streaming, it’s a lot easier for us to bring data from those other systems into our core platform and react in real time.

Being able to react to events in those systems means we can streamline and accelerate our onboarding process for new merchants, increasing the likelihood that they get their first contract sold to customers. Those improvements have an immediately apparent impact on the business.

But it’s important to focus on more than the value of these individual use cases. At Extend, the way we’re building on our event-driven architecture is very much focused on the future, in a way that I think will position digital-first companies well going forward.

With data streaming, what I often see people describing is really a “data-first” approach, which means you create your data and it goes to your persistent storage, like a database or S3 bucket. Then, you only send that data to the platform and systems that you want to communicate with—via a data streaming platform like Apache Kafka® or Confluent Cloud—after data at rest is persisted.

We’re aiming to go completely “event-first,” using data stored in Kafka as the source of truth. Then, we can replicate that data into many different places so it’s stored in a way that ensures the best performance for a specific case.

Having AWS as our cloud provider means we’re already most of the way there—we just need to plan ahead and build serverless, event-driven services with that same level of resilience. 

Going from data-first to event-first streaming is not necessarily a transition that everyone will be ready or able to make. There’s a lot of inertia to overcome once you have an established pattern, which prevents most organizations from switching over to something new.

But I think that’s an advantage of being earlier in our growth—because we’re already thinking about these considerations, we can be more strategic, minimize future technical debt, and unlock even more powerful use cases as we continue to build new data streaming applications and services for our customers.

These technical and business benefits aren’t exclusive to the tech industry or financial services—find out how data streaming is transforming every industry and why it’s an essential part of your long-term data strategy here .