Rabo Alerts originally resided on mainframe systems. Rabo Alerts has been in production for more than ten years and is available to millions of account holders. Customers can configure alerts based on their preferences and send them via three channels: email, SMS and mobile push notifications. One example of a simple event is when a certain amount is debited from or credited to your account.

The Rabo Alerts service alerts Rabobank customers whenever certain financial events occur. This post contains simplified source code listings (e.g., removing unused fields), but the listings still reflect the actual code running in production. All data types and code discussed below are in a GitHub repository. Rabo Alerts is a system formed by microservices that produce, consume and/or stream messages from BEB. The BEB client library implements the switching mechanisms for producers, consumers and streams applications. This allows for 24×7 continued operations during disaster scenarios and planned maintenance windows. In the event of data centre failure or operator intervention, BEB clients-including the Kafka Streams-based applications discussed here-may be switched over from one Kafka cluster to another without requiring a restart. Rabobank uses an Active-Active Kafka setup, which mirrors Kafka clusters in multiple data centres symmetrically. They chose Apache Kafka as the main engine and wrote their own BEB client library to help application developers with features like easy message producing/consuming and disaster recovery. But Rabobank has taken up this challenge and defined the Business Event Bus (BEB) as where business events from across the organisation are shared between applications.

Many banking processes are implemented as batch jobs on not-so-commodity hardware, so the migration task is immense. Anyone familiar with banking processes would understand that this is a giant step. Rabobank is also committed to being a leader in theįor the past few years, and partly with data protection compliance in mind, Rabobank has actively invested in becoming a real-time, event-driven bank.

With more than 900 branches, 48,000 employees and €681bn in assets, Netherlands-based Rabobank provides financial products and services to millions of customers worldwide. A cooperative bank, a socially responsible bank, it aims to be the market leader across all Dutch financial markets. This article by Axual founder, Jeroen van Disseldorp, discusses the use of Apache Kafka’s Streams API for sending alerts to Rabobank customers.

Spring kafka source code