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When German digital retail bank, Consorsbank, a BNP Paribas owned subsidiary, needed to enable its current account customers the ability to trade and bank in real-time via a single mobile application, they chose the Diffusion event-driven platform.

Consorsbank wanted to create the next generation consumer retail banking mobile application. Where most retail bank applications give customers the ability to check account balances, transfer balances and make payments, Consorsbank wanted its application to go further.

Consorsbank wanted to deliver far more than typical mobile retail banking application to their valued customers. They wanted to give customers the ability to:

• Create a custom ticker of stocks and shares and enter personal trades.
• Assign outgoing payments into categories, for example Car->Fuel, Personal->Gym Membership, Mobile Phone>Monthly Contract. The application learns which suppliers provide what services and automatically assigns payments to categories as they go out.
• Visually see graphs and charts of expenditure broken down into the assigned categories for ease of recognition of where money is going. For example, 22% of outgoings this month were on clothes.
• Receive alerts on unexpected transactions. For example, the largest transaction in an average month is €2,000, but this one was for €10,000.
• Receive account information and alerts to an Apple Watch.

The digital bank wanted their mobile application to be the central point for managing all of a customer’s accounts, engaging and tracking activity.

While building the new application, Consorsbank quickly came to the realization that a traditional Request/Response API style of interaction with back-end systems would not scale either for the anticipated number of users on the system or for the additional functionality planned in the future.

Consorsbank required a data platform that would isolate the bank's existing back-end systems from the load generated by tens of thousands of mobile clients.

Lastly, Consorsbank wanted to simplify application development and improve performance. Their existing application used different APIs for each of the back-end systems with which it interacted. This resulted in a low-performance application.

Many organizations must build business applications that can easily scale and run optimally over the Internet. Addressing the unknowns of the Internet is difficult – the speed and quality of the network, load on the network, time to send the data to backend servers, variable and often high load on the back-end servers, time to process/distribute/ store data on the back-end, time it takes for the data to be sent to the user devices and the quantity of data sent – to deliver a reliable, resilient, and high performance application. Consorsbank's requirements were to simply overcome these unknowns to deliver data in a scalable, efficient and reliable way so their customers received the optimal mobile experience.

Consorsbank knew of Push Technology through another BNP Paribas subsidiary, DAB bank. Consorsbank's sister bank had addressed their application data challenges with the Diffusion event-driven API platform.

As a result, Consorsbank elected to evaluate the Diffusion event-driven API platform to address their challenges and requirements in order to provide the optimal mobile banking experience to their customers.

As part of the evaluation, Consorsbank performed a side-by-side comparison of two versions of its application – one used Push Technology’s Diffusion platform and the other used traditional Request/Response messaging. Diffusion won the comparison test by delivering a superior user experience, increased performance, faster response times, and reduced network payload due to the platform's state-of-the-art data optimization and communication technology. The decision was made.

With Push Technology’s Diffusion event-driven API, Consorsbank quickly developed a high-performance, event-driven mobile banking application. They delivered a new application experience to their customers that reacts in real-time to business events using a simple consistent API that spans all customer devices. The result is business growth and satisfied customers.

An important ongoing benefit of the Diffusion platform is that whenever adds, modifies, or replaces a back-end system , Diffusion minimizes the impact of changes on the application, speeding support of new functionality and devices.

Today, Consorsbank uses the Diffusion platform for its world-class mobile banking and trading application which runs seamlessly on the full range of mobile devices. The bank also plans to use Diffusion across the organization for other internal and external projects.