Case Study: ING Bank achieves API-based data enrichment with Ververica's Flink SQL HTTP connector

ING Bank builds a custom HTTP connector in 16 minutes with Ververica

ING Bank, a long-time user of Apache Flink and Ververica, faced a challenge in its SQL-first streaming data platform: Flink SQL lacked the native capability to perform asynchronous API calls for data enrichment, a common requirement for stream processing. This gap prevented business users from easily enriching data streams with information from external web services using plain SQL.

Ververica worked with ING to develop a novel custom HTTP connector for FlinkSQL. This solution abstracted API endpoints as tables, allowing users to perform lookup joins for enrichment and even model inferencing. The connector automatically generated SQL table definitions from Open-API files, handled security and versioning, and managed runtime characteristics like scalability through caching. This empowered ING's business users to perform complex API integrations using simple SQL, streamlining development and enhancing the platform's capabilities without requiring deep technical knowledge of the APIs themselves.

ING Bank