Ep 12 - Shift Left, Stream Fast: The Real-Time Data Strategy Fueling Swedbank’s Future

In a highly regulated industry where every millisecond matters, Swedbank is shifting its data strategy to move fast without breaking trust. In this episode, Rami Al Lolah, Lead Architect at Swedbank’s Integration Center of Excellence, shares how the bank built a future-proof foundation using Apache Kafka® with Confluent Cloud.

From early investments in building reusable data products to shift left, , Swedbank’s strategy goes beyond infrastructure. It’s about enabling interoperability, eliminating data silos, and empowering teams to think differently about how data should flow across a modern financial institution.

You’ll Learn:

• How Swedbank reduces risk by accelerating data availability across teams
• Why “shift left” is a cultural and architectural shift,not just a development pattern
• Why choose Confluent over other solutions
• Where Swedbank sees the biggest opportunities for AI and streaming in the future

Whether you're leading modernization for a financial institution or scaling real-time data for your organization, this episode offers a blueprint for transformation. 

About the Guest:
Rami Al Lolah is a seasoned professional, technologist and domain expert for 25+ years within the application and systems integration domain. His expertise is in delivering, designing, writing major integration solutions from world leading integration technology providers, leading technical/services teams, and directing major integration technical implementations. 

Guest Highlight: 
“We need to embrace the [shift left] mindset and methodology, and try to move critical considerations, for example — compliance, security, governance, and data quality earlier in the development process. This means that when teams build something like a Kafka topic, or even an API or a file based integration, they are not just focusing on making it work technically. They are already thinking about who owns it, who owns the data, what the contract, what the schemas look like, who will access this data, and how the access will be managed.”

Episode Timestamps: 
*(06:40) - Data Streaming Goodness
*(33:15) -   The Runbook: Winning Strategies
*(41:15) -    Data Streaming Street Cred
*(47:40) - Quick Bytes
*(54:30) - Joseph’s Top 3 Takeaways

Dive Deeper into Data Streaming:

• EP1—Stream On: Unleashing Innovation with Data Streaming | Life Is But A Stream
• EP2—Processing Without Pause: Continuous Stream Processing and Apache Flink® | Life Is But A Stream
• EP3—The Connective Tissue: Shift Left to turn Data Chaos to Clarity | Life Is But A Stream

Links & Resources:

• Connect with Joseph: @thedatagiant
• Joseph’s LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/thedatagiant
• Rami’s LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/ramiallolah
• Learn more at Confluent.io

Our Sponsor:  
Your data shouldn’t be a problem to manage. It should be your superpower. The Confluent data streaming platform transforms organizations with trustworthy, real-time data that seamlessly spans your entire environment and powers innovation across every use case. Create smarter, deploy faster, and maximize efficiency with a true data streaming platform from the pioneers in data streaming. Learn more at confluent.io

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