Boost Unlocks The Value of Customer Data with AWS

Boost, Axiata Group Berhad’s award-winning homegrown e-wallet, and one of Malaysia’s largest payment platforms, has set itself the goal of transforming the payment experience into a truly cashless one.

“We’re here to transform the way society transacts. We want to achieve our goal through delivering cashless solutions that cover all touchpoints in one’s lifestyle; delivered in a way that’s easy, fun and rewarding for our customers,” says Soneeq Mohsin Syed, Assistant Vice President of Commercial Insights & Analytics at Boost.

The company, which currently serves nearly 9 million consumers across Malaysia, built its existing customer database on Amazon Web Services (AWS). As customer data volumes increased with business growth, Boost recognized that the big data could be better leveraged to derive marketing insights that offer customers a more seamless experience on the mobile app.

However, to unlock insights from the data, the company needed to overcome limitations in its data infrastructure, which had grown complex and fragmented over time. The company also needed to expand its reporting capabilities to address the needs of business units and meet increasingly complex reporting requirements for planning and compliance purposes.

“As an existing customer of AWS, we wanted to leverage more advanced solutions to build a powerful data lake that would simplify our data architecture, and enable new analytics and reporting capabilities,” says Syed.

With the help of AWS Partner Network (APN) Partner, Aspire Nxt, Boost addressed its challenges by implementing several AWS solutions to tap the hidden potential of its unstructured data.

Aspire Nxt worked with Boost to leverage Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) to build the company’s new customer data lake, and incorporated Amazon Redshift as a data warehouse to enable query-in-place and analytics capabilities to analyze petabytes of structured and semi-structured data across Boost’s data lake. Finally, AWS Glue was adopted as a fully managed extract, transform, and load (ETL) service to enable its data analysts to easily prepare and load data for analytics.

“We appreciate the daily check points during the implementation process—that helped us to flag potential issues early and keep the project on schedule,” commends Syed. “Aspire Nxt not only possesses the technical expertise to implement the data and analytics solutions, but is also able to provide strategic consultancy through every stage of Boost’s ongoing data journey.”

With rapid customer growth, the last thing Boost needed to worry about was whether the data infrastructure could keep up with business demands. AWS provided a solution that was highly agile and flexible, allowing Boost to launch marketing initiatives quickly, scale seasonal campaigns on-demand, and add new features to its e-wallet app for improved end-user satisfaction—all the while keeping costs under control.

“Now, our consumer campaigns can respond to market demands rapidly, thanks to the platform’s ability to scale up and down according to our needs in a timely manner,” adds Syed.

By building the new data lake, Boost could bring together all its data from various sources, and at any scale, into one central repository. The company could also run different types of analytics–from dashboards and visualizations to big data processing, real-time analytics, and machine learning–to guide better marketing decisions.

Because Boost’s entire data architecture was already residing on AWS, the company could quickly implement Amazon S3, Amazon Redshift and AWS Glue, which offer the deepest integration possible with one another. This helped to minimize deployment complexity and made it easier for Boost to build its advanced analytics, forecasting and reporting tools on a robust foundation.

Thanks to the new platform, Boost gained complete visibility into the end-user lifecycle—from the moment a customer signs up to the time the e-wallet app is uninstalled. This helped the company acquire a deeper understanding of its users’ end-to-end behavior, increase spend by 17 percent, improve retention with 50 percent more active users, and reduce churn by 15 percent.

Boost data analysts are now able to run more analytics reports with at least 99 percent accuracy for all business units, and has seen data requests grow by four times, according to Syed.

“In our industry, speed is essential. Rather than waiting to have perfect information, strategic decisions are often made based on a 70-percent rule,” states Syed. “AWS has empowered us to hit that proverbial 70 percent faster than before, dramatically reducing time for data analysis from weeks to days.”

The company has also expanded the number of analytics dashboards and automated reports to at least two major dashboards and six focused reports for internal departments like product & marketing, fraud management, and finance. Departmental heads now enjoy better visibility and control of the data at an operational level.

With the ability to define clearer customer segmentations and usage patterns, the company has learned how to design better marketing campaigns. “AWS has empowered Boost to improve customer satisfaction, significantly boosting marketing campaign results by 65 percent,” affirms Syed.

“As the e-wallet space matures in Asia, we need to do more to stand out,” he adds. “Our ultimate goal is to enable targeting and personalization to each user, and we believe the steps we’ve taken with AWS today will enable us in helping each customer feel like truly valued individuals.”

To learn more, visit Data Lakes and Analytics on AWS.