Moneysupermarket Group: Creating a data-driven business culture with Google Cloud
About Moneysupermarket Group
Moneysupermarket Group's purpose is to help UK households save money. It does so through its price comparison service MoneySuperMarket, MoneySavingExpert - which is one of the UK's biggest consumer finance websites and Quidco - a leading cashback site with over 5,000 retailers.
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Contact usMoneysupermarket Group worked with Google Cloud to develop a new data platform that would support a wide range of business functions and guarantee exemplary security for customer information.
Google Cloud results
- Streams 13 million events into BigQuery per day
- Table creation in under 20 seconds
- Activity on the website is available for analysis within five seconds
- More than 700 tables loaded through a single pipeline
Reduced data latency from 24 hours to 10 seconds
Handled correctly, data can help organizations customize their services to their customers' needs, personalize their communications, make insightful decisions and spot emerging trends. The importance of data is recognized across the Moneysupermarket Group. "We strongly believe in our mission, which is saving households money," says Matt Cresswell, Chief Data Officer, Moneysupermarket Group.
"Google Cloud is definitely up there when it comes to data analytics capabilities, and the Google Cloud technologies we work with have really enabled us to make our strategy work."
—Matt Cresswell, Chief Data Officer, Moneysupermarket GroupThe group operates several brands, which include MoneySuperMarket, MoneySavingExpert, Quidco, and Decision Tech. "Having several different brands enables us to offer our customers a wide range of options," says Cresswell. "Historically, we've created separate tech stacks for each one. Our priority is to create synergies between our platforms so we can gain a holistic overview of our customers while offering them a more streamlined experience."
Rapid business growth left Moneysupermarket Group in a position where potentially valuable data was scattered across different verticals, causing the company to miss out on insights and opportunities for growth. To eliminate those data silos, empower its internal data team and reduce data latency while ensuring exemplary security for sensitive customer information, Moneysupermarket Group turned to Google Cloud. "Google Cloud is definitely up there when it comes to data analytics capabilities, and the Google Cloud technologies we work with have really enabled us to make our strategy work," says Cresswell.
Eliminating data silos to support a range of business operations
When Cresswell joined Moneysupermarket Group, the company's data environment was siloed. "We had a big data estate for analytics, but a lot of streaming data wasn't being captured in the existing environment. The first thing we did was set out a clear data strategy based on the aim of bringing all our data together," Cresswell explains. "Our aim was to make data a first-class experience across the organization and tackle all the 'dark data' that never made its way into an analytics environment." Since moving to Google Cloud and implementing a new architecture, the company's analytics data estate has grown eight times in 18 months.
"BigQuery, Dataflow and Pub/Sub provide us with the serverless capability to handle data volumes at scale and support our goal of making raw data discoverable. It shines a light on what would've previously just disappeared and vanished."
—Matt Cresswell, Chief Data Officer, Moneysupermarket GroupThe data team built an end-to-end streaming data pipeline that ingests live streamed events, applies schema detection and data processing using Pub/Sub and Dataflow, and pushes them into BigQuery. "BigQuery, Dataflow and Pub/Sub provide us with the serverless capability to handle data volumes at scale and support our goal of making raw data discoverable. It shines a light on what would've previously just disappeared and vanished," says Cresswell.
Another major aim was to reduce maintenance time while empowering engineers to handle issues and respond rapidly to requests. "Previously, fragmented tech stacks designed for each customer channel meant we ended up with a complicated data ingestion framework that needed a lot of TLC to keep it running, but also respond to upstream engineering changes," Cresswell says. "Previous data deployments took days, involved multiple handoffs and cross team coordination. We really wanted to flip this model and build solutions to manage schema evolution. Now engineers simply self-serve and modify a little config to publish new data into Google Cloud in minutes."
Safeguarding customer data with security by design
Data freshness was a major priority for price comparison service MoneySuperMarket. "There are a lot of valuable interactions with our customers online, and accessing that data quickly was important for us," says Chris Harte, Head of Data Engineering, Moneysupermarket Group. In the past, when a customer interacted with our website, the related data would reach the analytics team around 24 hours later. That number has now dropped to 10 seconds, providing valuable real-time insights.
Ensuring the security of data that includes customer personally identifiable information, or PII, is of utmost importance to Moneysupermarket Group. The team has implemented a "privacy by design" approach as a core principle. "There has been a big change in terms of security and how we handle data and control access," Cresswell explains. "We worked to improve the security of the system and get it up to Center for Internet Security (CIS) benchmarks so we would be ready once the new data strategy came in."
All raw data is strictly locked down in the base table. Queryable data is surfaced in authorized views following the application of a series of privacy controls, including Identity and Access Management permissions, policy tags and data pseudonymization. "Data Catalog, specifically the policy tags, has really made a difference from our security and access control perspective," Harte confirms. "We're now in a much better cybersecurity position. We've reduced our risk profile considerably, even though we've increased the amount of data we process."
Looking to the future with real-time sales
Cresswell feels that the core skill set of the Moneysupermarket Group data team has evolved considerably as a result of the project. "Previously a large proportion of our time was spent maintaining infrastructure and data pipelines. But now, I'd say there's a much bigger focus on using our talent to engineer new data products, either by making data easier to use and more accessible or helping customers save money," he says.
The data team is looking forward to using data to unlock further value for partners and customers. "We now have a single source of truth with all our data together in one platform. We've moved towards having our common data model with everyone singing from the same hymn sheet, which makes things a lot easier," Harte adds.
"The way people view data within Moneysupermarket Group before we started with Google Cloud and now is completely different. There's so much positivity and talk about the great progress we've made and the technologies we're using. It's beginning to really change the culture and DNA of the business."
—Chris Harte, Head of Data Engineering, Moneysupermarket Group"We're looking forward to providing our partners with more insights into what people want and helping them grow their business, and now that we've got all our data in one place, we're in the right space to do that," Cresswell says. Machine Learning (ML) will also be a key part of the company's strategy going forward. This includes a move to real time sales, in which sales via partner companies are confirmed within a matter of seconds, rather than days. The company will also be exploring the potential of MLOps to support more advanced ML use cases.
"The way people view data within Moneysupermarket Group before we started with Google Cloud and now is completely different," says Harte. "There's so much positivity and talk about the great progress we've made and the technologies we're using. It's beginning to really change the culture and DNA of the business. It's a big internal step forward because it helps us become more aware and operate at a high level, which ultimately benefits customers."
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
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About Moneysupermarket Group
Moneysupermarket Group's purpose is to help UK households save money. It does so through its price comparison service MoneySuperMarket, MoneySavingExpert - which is one of the UK's biggest consumer finance websites and Quidco - a leading cashback site with over 5,000 retailers.