Case Study: Discovery Bank achieves hyper-personalized banking and faster data product delivery with Databricks

Fostering financial resilience through hyper-personalization

Discovery Bank launched in 2019 to reinvent banking in South Africa with a shared-value, customer-centric model, but it struggled to turn complex data pipelines into fast, reliable outcomes. Using the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform, Discovery Bank set out to combine data, actuarial science, behavioral economics, AI, and machine learning to build hyper-personalized banking experiences and better manage client risk.

With Databricks, Discovery Bank created a centralized data ecosystem that simplified pipelines, eliminated SQL conversions, and accelerated analytics and model development. The results were significant: data processing became 20x faster, data product creation and implementation became 5x faster, model-building capacity rose to more than 300 models per day, and its next-best-action model drove a 40% uplift in engagement initiative impact.

Discovery Bank

Stuart Emslie

Head of Actuarial and Data Science