March 6, 2025
It's a Tuesday morning in London. You're rushing to catch the Tube when your phone buzzes. Your cousin in Lagos, Nigeria, needs money for emergency surgery, or the hospital won't admit her. You need to be able to send the money now and trust it will get there without any problems.
That's where Nala Money, an international money transfer app, comes in. When the platform promises your funds will reach Africa in minutes, they understand the weight of that commitment and why their customers can’t afford delays.
Founded in 2017, Nala is on a mission to deliver payments for the next billion, by providing a platform for customers in the UK, US, and EU to send fast, safe and reliable payments to loved ones. To improve its operations, Nala has been rapidly evolving its data capabilities. Dai Renshaw, Head of Data at Nala, has been instrumental in this transformation. He explains:
"When I joined over two years ago as the first data hire, we had essentially no data stack and very limited business intelligence. Now, we've consciously built out what we think is a very good data stack to enable sophisticated business intelligence across all functions, along with data science capabilities."
A key part of this evolution was Nala’s recent partnership with Streamkap, a real-time data streaming provider built on Apache Kafka and Flink. Streamkap has enabled Nala to live stream their data into Snowflake, a powerful data computing platform. The enhanced data processing capabilities enable Nala Money’s teams to make informed decisions quickly, ultimately improving service reliability and customer experience in time-sensitive money transfers.
The need for real-time data replication
Nala manages large volumes of data, including transactions, user accounts, FX rates, and provider reliability data. However, their main database was optimized for quick read and write transactions, not for analytics. As a result, the setup fell short when the company needed more sophisticated data handling.
The data team needed to replicate their core data into Snowflake to enable data monitoring and advanced analysis for their operational workloads, such as payment operations and pricing decisions. While Nala Money’s previous batch data solution could replicate the data into Snowflake roughly every hour, it couldn’t serve real-time data needs.
Competitive rate monitoring is a prime example of where Nala relies on live data to inform its operations. For instance, if a customer wants to send £100 to Kenya, Nala might offer an exchange rate of 180 Kenyan Shillings per pound. However, competitors might offer rates of 178 or 182.
Nala needs to constantly monitor these market fluctuations, competitor movements, and mid-market rates to inform their pricing strategy. Real-time data is essential for making quick decisions, such as whether to adjust their rate to attract more volume (potentially at the cost of reduced margins) or maintain their current position. These complex decisions require not just live data, but also sophisticated analytics capabilities that can process this information instantly – a combination that wasn't possible with their setup of a transactional database and batch updates.
Sophisticated data analysis unlocked
Renshaw recalls, “I was given a recommendation by a friend who said, 'Have you seen Streamkap?' So, we investigated, and although they seemed like a new player, we decided to start small and test it out.”
The Nala data team quickly discovered Streamkap to be a reliable, cost-effective database replication service providing live data. "Over time, we've built a relationship with the team and seen the product perform without any issues," Renshaw notes.
Streamkap enabled Nala to replicate data from their transactional databases into Snowflake in real-time at a much lower cost, providing their ability to manage operational workloads requiring up-to-the-minute information. Renshaw explains,
“Streamkap was the key that unlocked our ability to manage live use cases, essential for our reporting stack built on users, transactions, and FX rates."
Goodbye high-cost, high latency. Hello ‘instant and cheaper’ data
By enabling real-time data streaming into Snowflake, Nala can now perform live data analyses that were previously unavailable with their batch data solution. This has led to several tangible benefits:
Real-time rate monitoring: The ability to access real-time data has bolstered Nala’s pricing strategy. Renshaw shares: “We’re now able to react quickly to market changes, which is crucial for adjusting our exchange rates. This capability prevents us from losing money due to slow reaction times. For example, if we see a competitor offering a better rate, we can instantly adjust our own rates to stay competitive.”
Real-time provider monitoring: With live data, Nala can monitor provider reliability in real-time. “We can switch providers quickly if issues arise,” says Renshaw. “The last thing we want is delays to our customers. They might be sending money for really important reasons, like paying a hospital bill. If they can’t get that money in time, it can have serious consequences. By using Streamkap, we can quickly identify and switch away from providers experiencing issues, ensuring the money gets where it needs to be in minutes.”
Low costs, low latency: Streamkap has streamlined Nala’s data replication process, reducing costs significantly while improving speed. Renshaw noted, “It made sense to switch to Streamkap for database replication because it's essentially instant and cheaper. Everyone is trying to keep their budgets down. You don’t want to be overspending in different areas. It’s awesome that we don’t actually have to spend more to bring in something that’s improving what we’re doing.”
Team productivity: The data team at Nala has greatly benefited from the efficiency and reliability of Streamkap. Renshaw explained, “It has raised the profile of the team and unlocked a bunch of different projects that we can now tackle. It's almost removed internal frustrations because we’ve wanted to work on these live data use cases but couldn't before.”
Reliable, rich insights in real-time
Nala Money was founded to address the critical issues of high fees and unreliable payment systems in Africa – and the work of their data team continues to be a critical part of achieving that mission. Streamkap has now become an integral part of Nala's data infrastructure, enabling real-time insights and decision-making that were previously out of reach. By providing instant data replication at a lower cost, Streamkap has empowered Nala to enhance its operational efficiency, improve customer service, and maintain its competitive edge in the international remittance market.
“We want to be able to move as fast as possible, while making sure we’re still working off reliable and rich insights,” Renshaw says. “Streamkap provides that speed at a cheaper cost, and combined with the other tools, we can build and raise the sophistication of the work that we can deliver. Without Streamkap, that was very difficult. That’s really what it comes down to.”
