Reduced platform maintenance resources by 50%
Prevented an estimated $5 billion in potential fraud in 2025 alone
Democratized data access for business and fraud analysts through standard SQL
Achieved superior PII protection using BigQuery policy tags and granular access controls
Unico, a global identity network, migrated its data operations from Databricks to BigQuery as part of a broader initiative to modernize its data platform and improve operational efficiency. By leveraging BigQuery and Spanner, Unico now processes 1.5 billion identity verifications annually with enhanced privacy, real-time observability, and a 50% increase in team efficiency.
Unico, a global identity network, migrated its data operations from Databricks to BigQuery as part of a broader initiative to modernize its data platform and improve operational efficiency. By leveraging BigQuery and Spanner, Unico now processes 1.5 billion identity verifications annually with enhanced privacy, real-time observability, and a 50% increase in team efficiency.
Scaling infrastructure for global growth
As Unico’s global footprint expanded, the team proactively sought to optimize its data operations and align them with the next stage of the company's growth. To support this massive scale, Unico transitioned its data infrastructure on Databricks toward a more streamlined, cloud-native architecture.
The objective was to optimize operational costs, simplify data ingestion workflows, and reduce the engineering overhead previously required to maintain custom orchestration tools. By moving away from complex cluster management, Unico aimed to free up valuable engineering resources to focus on core product innovation. Additionally, the migration addressed the need for deeper, unified observability across all data workloads.
To achieve this modernized vision, Unico selected BigQuery as its core fully managed, serverless enterprise data warehouse. Integrating seamlessly with their existing Google Cloud footprint, BigQuery allowed Unico to simplify infrastructure management, leverage native Google Cloud ingestion and governance tools, and establish a highly scalable foundation for the future.
BigQuery was a game changer regarding data privacy because we have a lot more control using policy tags and protecting PII data. It is managed by Google; we just choose how many slots we want to use.
Rogério Tadeu Da Rocha Camargo Filho
Senior Manager of Data Platform Engineering, Unico
Multimodal intelligence and the power of Spanner
Unico's core business involves processing highly sensitive multimodal data, including facial biometry and identity documents. To handle this at scale, Unico utilizes a sophisticated architecture where unstructured data, such as facial biometrics, is securely processed and analyzed at high throughput.
The company is a heavy user of Cloud Spanner to ensure the high availability and strict SLAs required for transactional identity checks. For analytical workloads, BigQuery serves as the central hub, providing a "Swiss Army knife" environment where data scientists can use Python or SQL for exploratory analysis and modeling. The integration of Datastream has further optimized their ingestion layer, providing high-quality data through Change Data Capture (CDC) with minimal latency.
Protecting sensitive data is a massive win for a business where trusting how people's data is managed is a strategic asset.
Lucas Migliorini De Freitas
Data Engineer, Unico
Democratizing data and driving future innovation
The migration to BigQuery has fundamentally changed how data is consumed at Unico. By moving away from complex Spark and Scala requirements to standard SQL, the data platform team has democratized access for business and marketing analysts. This shift, combined with the adoption of Dataform for governance and CI/CD, has allowed Unico to optimize its platform operations, successfully reallocating 50% of its engineering capacity from maintenance tasks to strategic capability building.
Looking forward, Unico is exploring the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform to further enhance its fraud detection capabilities. With a centralized, serverless platform, Unico is now better positioned to make smart resource commitment decisions based on clear observability provided by BigQuery’s information schema.
We used to have many problems identifying why workloads were slow. Now, we have all this metadata for us in information schema; observability and workload management became a lot easier.
Nilo Sergio de Assis Junior
Data Engineer, Unico
Unico is the leading identity verification network in Latin America, and a global provider of trust infrastructure. By utilizing proprietary technology biometrics and machine learning, Unico eliminates fraud and secures digital transactions for a safer, more efficient world. For more information, visit www.unico.io.
Industry: Technology
Locations: Brazil, United States
Products: BigQuery, Cloud Spanner, Datastream, Dataform, Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform
