Get on the front foot with a tactical approach to data integration

By Tom Ainsworth, Head of Customer Engagement, Jitterbit

Every company on the planet has been rocked by the changes to consumer behaviour prompted by the pandemic. But, while some sectors might struggle to find their feet again post-pandemic, the fintech industry has an opportunity to steal a march. With some agile thinking and tactical choices on data integration, companies can expedite growth—just as youth fintech company gohenry has.

Field of dreams

gohenry is a children’s prepaid debit card and financial education app conceived by a group of parents while watching their children play in a football match. With our economy digitised and our consumer transactions increasingly cashless, the founders realised there was a need for a simple and meaningful answer to the issue of kids’ money management. Their solution? A service that includes a debit card and money management app for children aged 6-18 that gives kids control, but allows parents to guide them through those important early financial experiences.

That initial ‘eureka’ moment was in 2012. Since then, gohenry has made its 1.5 million-strong community more confident with money—doubling its customer base every year for the past six years—and has recently attracted investment funding led by U.S. growth-equity firm Edison Partners, with investment from Gaia Capital Partners, Citi Ventures and Muse Capital. They’ve been rapidly expanding in the UK and US this year—which is why Jitterbit initially started talking with the gohenry team.

Changing landscape

With more contactless payments being made and more time being spent online because of the pandemic (according to gohenry’s Youth Economy Report more than half of Gen Alpha and Gen Z spending occurred online last year), parents’ desire to teach their kids to be good with money in this new landscape has increased—reflected by the boom in gohenry member numbers.

Rapid growth, and the resulting need to quickly scale using an ever evolving mix of cloud and legacy technologies, requires companies to take stock of the technologies and integrations they use - and how they manage those integration points. That’s exactly what gohenry did. They found that gohenry’s need for data visibility, its commitment to customer service and differing data regulations across the globe meant they needed an integration platform-as-a-service. Creating and managing integrations in this way would ensure no disruption to their high levels of customer experience, while keeping the company agile enough to continue their impressive growth trajectory.

360-degree thinking

The best approach to meet these needs is to generate a complete 360-degree customer view—with integrated data from the entire customer journey—in the most efficient way. To do this, the gohenry team selected the self-serve Jitterbit Data Loader tool, an off-the-shelf pre-built tool that enabled them to avoid laboriously building one from scratch. Jitterbit’s Data Loader was capable of handling a large-scale project such as this because of its ease of use, low-code, fast implementation (deployed in just three weeks from proof of concept), and predefined components.

Once the data from multiple platforms and tools was cleansed—with 99.9% accuracy—and structured, gohenry moved onto Jitterbit’s Harmony platform to manage and automate the hundreds of different  integration points within the business. Around 20,000 to 40,000 data updates are made every hour within Jitterbit, so data is continually cleaned—with zero failures. On top of that, by deploying Jitterbit Harmony, gohenry was able to reduce customer service administrative time by 17%, easing the demand on resources and allowing representatives to refocus that time on delivering an exemplary customer experience.

By reviewing data integration processes and deciding to use an integration platform, the gohenry management team now has access to fully integrated, real-time insights into the business, while their customer service team has  a 360-degree view of each and every customer—all without the exertion of building and managing hundreds of different software integrations themselves. With that single and complete perspective, gohenry is on the front foot in this new world and set for future growth.