Hundreds of millions of residents of South East Asia have only limited access to banking and finance services. However, help is at hand. One of South East Asia’s largest fintech businesses, Ascend Money is using digital technologies to realize its mission of enabling as many people as possible to access innovative financial services and live better lives.

According to Ascend Money, 60 percent of the region’s 620 million residents do not have access to a full suite of financial services. Even a relatively small proportion of this market represents a big opportunity for the business.

Ascend Money’s offerings include the TrueMoney regional payment platform for underserved and digital consumers. The TrueMoney platform supports more than 40 million consumers across six countries: Cambodia, Indonesia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam.

“We found, based on value, ease of use, effectiveness, and the skills and adaptability of our own team members, BigQuery and other Google Cloud Platform services were the best fit for our business.”

– Abraham Jarrett, Head of Engineering, Ascend Money

TrueMoney also provides an e-wallet app that provides easy ways to top up mobile phones, undertake online shopping, and pay for products and services; a network of 65,000 branded shops; and international remittances, initially between Thailand and Myanmar. In addition, Ascend Money offers financial products to small to medium businesses.

Ascend Money is part of the South East Asian online business Ascend Group, which also operates e-commerce, e-procurement, data centers, cloud services, fulfilment, and digital marketing services.

Cost is a key criteria

Ascend Money initially started operations using physical infrastructure and on-premises workforce productivity applications. However, as the business grew its customer base and expanded into new markets, its technology leaders began to explore options to improve value for money; reduce the maintenance load on in-house team members; improve its data management and analysis; and collaborate more effectively.

“Operating our own on-premises infrastructure entails a higher cost of ownership and maintenance, as well as requiring us to scale up our hardware as needed,” says Abraham Jarrett, Head of Engineering, Ascend Money. “We conducted an evaluation and found that moving to the cloud would deliver a range of benefits.”

G Suite and Google Cloud Platform the best fit

The business evaluated solutions available in the market and opted to move to G Suite and Google Cloud Platform.

“Moving to Google Cloud Platform was an optimization exercise, with lowering our costs our primary goal, and achieving better performance an added benefit,” says Jarrett. Google Cloud Platform monitoring, diagnostic, and analytics tools have enabled Ascend Money to reduce its infrastructure spending, becoming more efficient and cost-effective in the process.

“Managing software is a big cost for us. Through G Suite, we are significantly reducing our software deployment, licensing, and repair costs.”

– Abraham Jarrett, Head of Engineering, Ascend Money

The Ascend Money team saw Google Kubernetes Engine as enabling a seamless way of transitioning from an on-premises data center to a cloud service. “We considered industry trends such as what people were adopting and who we could hire when making our decision,” says Jarrett. “Engineering teams are focusing on using Kubernetes open source container management at scale and as a way of doing business, which was attractive to us.

“Google Kubernetes Engine presented the easiest way to manage and orchestrate our containers, and drive us away from our existing infrastructure.”

BigQuery best for cost and ease of use

Ascend Money also reviewed data infrastructure solutions, with its business intelligence and data platform teams considering a range of options. The teams quickly ruled out an on-premises solution due to the capital investment required and opted for a cloud service. Following a rigorous evaluation of Google Cloud Platform against the services offered by another cloud provider, Ascend Money opted to run on Google Cloud.

“We found, based on value, ease of use, effectiveness, and the skills and adaptability of our own team members, BigQuery and other Google Cloud Platform services were the best fit for our business,” says Jarrett. The business is now running an architecture comprising a BigQuery analytics data warehouse; Cloud Storage to store raw and archive data; Cloud Dataflow to process stream and batch data, and Cloud Pub/Sub for event ingestion and delivery.

“We’re expanding our utilization of BigQuery and other services on a daily basis,” says Jarrett.

Ascend Money is also using a range of Google Cloud Platform services for the infrastructure outside its data platform, including Stackdriver logging and monitoring; Cloud KMS to manage cryptographic keys for its cloud services, Cloud Build to undertake continuous integration, delivery, and deployment; Cloud DNS to provide domain name system services; and Cloud Functions to enable its developers to run and scale code in the cloud.

With Google Cloud Platform, Ascend Money is now processing about 12GB of batch data per day and streaming data from about 200 data marts per day in Thailand alone.

Cost effective scalability and faster to market

Google Kubernetes Engine has enabled the business to scale and deliver to market faster. “We can build on the platform, take the application and container and deploy them to scale out,” says Jarrett. “The Google Kubernetes Engine orchestration mechanism that provides containerized, elastic scalability is extremely important in allowing us to manage costs and expend our effort efficiently. Through Kubernetes, we can write once and deploy everywhere.”

With Google Cloud Platform, the business has saved 3,000,000 THB (about US$90,000) in licensing costs and, through automation tools, reduced the time to complete infrastructure activities by 50 percent.

“We don’t have as many meetings since we deployed G Suite and we can work effectively in a distributed fashion.”

– Abraham Jarrett, Head of Engineering, Ascend Money

Ascend Money’s entire workforce is now using G Suite to collaborate and operate productively. The business is achieving a range of benefits including being able to get new team members up and running more quickly and reduced cost. “Managing software is a big cost for us,” says Jarrett. “Through G Suite, we are significantly reducing our software deployment, licensing, and repair costs.” Meanwhile, the shorter time to onboard team members to G Suite is paying off with improved productivity and an accelerated ability to collaborate.

Ascend Money team members primarily use Sheets, Slides, and Docs to create internal materials, including product requirement documents in Docs and workforce and project planning spreadsheets in Sheets.

The organization also uses Hangouts Meet to collaborate when working from different locations. “We don’t have as many meetings since we deployed G Suite and we can work effectively in a distributed fashion,” says Jarrett. “People can work from home and we have five regions plus Thailand where they can collaborate live on a document, such as a slide deck for board meetings or meetings with our chief executive officer, head of engineering, or other senior managers.”

20 hours per week saved

Jarrett describes the time savings of using web browser-based productivity software and G Suite as saving them an average of 20 hours per week. This has improved productivity and the quality of life for Ascend Money’s hard-working team, increasing overall staff satisfaction.

“The ability to work remotely is a big win for us,” Jarrett says. “Our team members can keep one computer at work and one at home and access the same information, they can work in a plane while it sits on the tarmac, or update a Google Doc or a Google Sheet in real time on their phone. They can work anytime, from any location, as long as they have an internet connection. They have less dead time, meaning more uptime.”

With Google Cloud Platform and G Suite, Ascend Money is ideally positioned to support growing demand for its fintech services in South East Asia, particularly among people with limited access to banking. “We have the agility and dynamism to support rising demand and look forward to continuing to work with Google to realize our business ambitions,” says Jarrett.

Healthcare leaders are increasingly challenged to drive operational improvements throughout their facilities, and inefficiencies can cost organizations both time and money and impact patient outcomes. Additionally, staffing shortages and employee burnout remain a major concern in healthcare. Addressing these challenges can help healthcare providers improve organizational operations, patient experiences and care. However, the information that they need to solve these problems is siloed and challenging to access, buried deep in the patient record or spread across IT systems that don’t speak to one another. 

To generate a longitudinal patient view and improve patient care, healthcare providers need to reduce fragmentation, unify, and standardize data across siloed systems of records, care facilities and ultimately make it interoperable. This is the heart of Google Cloud’s Healthcare Data Engine. 

In partnership with customers, we are prioritizing a ‘use case’ approach to accelerate the adoption of data interoperability. We initially introduced these accelerators a few months ago, and the response has been overwhelmingly positive. Since then, we have been incorporating feedback from early adopters and making improvements to ensure that these accelerators deliver the best possible value to our customers.  

The accelerators are deployable use-case configured ‘starter-kits’ within Healthcare Data Engine designed to quickly surface tailored insights with the goal of enabling higher quality of care. Focused on patient flow, transition of care, and social determinants of health, the accelerators provide aggregated data and visualizations to help customers understand a broad range of facility efficiency metrics, patient insight and health equity measures across their patient populations: 

1. Patient Flow Explorer: Enables health systems to surface a range of facility efficiency metrics to identify trends and potential drivers of bottlenecks, manage patient admissions, transfers and length of stay, while optimizing departmental capacity management.
2. Transition of Care Explorer:  Provides medical professionals a consolidated view into a patient’s detail and medical history, illustrating their journeys in different settings within the health system and helps caregivers prioritize patient treatment.
3. Social Determinants of Health Explorer:  Leverages Healthcare Data Engine and social determinants of health data to identify at risk populations of patients in near-real-time and improve care in under-served communities.

The first three accelerator use cases were designed in collaboration with industry healthcare leaders including Highmark Health, Lifepoint Health, and others, helping organizations address common industry challenges.

“Interoperability is at the heart of Highmark Health’s Living Health strategy and we intend to leverage our blended structure of payor and provider to deliver a differentiated health experience for our patients and members,” said Richard Clarke, chief data and analytics officer, Highmark Health. “Healthcare Data Engine is a central component to enabling that strategy and we are excited about the new accelerators being announced today as they will speed up time-to-value for our members.”

“Google Cloud’s solution-oriented approach brings the best of technology and healthcare together to help improve quality, increase access and ensure equitable care for patients no matter where they live,” said Jessica Beegle, senior vice president and chief innovation officer of Lifepoint Health. “Instead of giving us building blocks that need to be assembled, they are delivering custom-built solutions to help us efficiently tackle key problems in our markets and provide more useful data for our clinical teams to take better care of their patients. Lifepoint is proud to partner with Google Cloud and bring the best of Silicon Valley to communities of all sizes across the United States.”

At Google Cloud, we will continue our partnership with healthcare leaders to identify the most impactful Healthcare Data Engine use cases to support, to help organizations accelerate their data transformations to bring better, more timely care to patients and communities. To learn more about Healthcare Data Engine and other solutions tailored to the healthcare and life sciences space, visit cloud.google.com/healthcare.

With the rise of technologies like smartphones, retailers have felt the pressure to meet evolving consumer needs and expectations. Seven-Eleven Japan(“SEJ”) has long been on the forefront of this thanks to the way they develop and invest in IT. However, in recent years, Japan’s leading convenience store chain has struggled to maintain its complex legacy systems at the rate needed to keep up with today’s rapid digitization, spurred on by the increasing proliferation of smartphones and an IT vendor-dependent structure.  

Legacy systems limiting real-time responsiveness and innovation 

Since its early days, SEJ has been proactive in adopting information technology, mainly relying on technology solutions from Japan’s leading vendors. But as the systems have grown, key business issues have been resolved using a vendor-dependent structure rather than being driven by SEJ’s own needs.  

Datasets and business logic were combined and built into legacy environments, gradually leading to data silos. As a result, data was distributed across multiple systems, causing a variety of problems, including the inability to efficiently retrieve data when needed, delays in accessing data collected in individual stores, and difficulties taking measurements at the right time in business operations that require real-time responsiveness.

Connecting different systems also takes time and money, and the lead time for introducing new services—from planning to development and launch—has been longer than expected. 

To solve these problems, SEJ’s IT department built “Seven Central”—a new platform for practical data use launched in 2020 to support the company’s future IT strategies and digital transformation initiatives.

At its core, Seven Central’s ultimate purpose is to allow real-time data views. Versatile, real-time datasets—such as point-of-sale (POS) data from 7-Eleven stores—are consolidated into a centralized location in the cloud. They created a simple data mart that provides data via an API to enable them to respond more quickly to requests from individual departments. 

“In such uncertain times, it’s vital to use data to make quick decisions,” says Izuru Nishimura, Executive Officer and Head of ICT Department. “Each department across the entire company will be able to gain an immediate understanding of the situation based on the most up-to-date data and respond accordingly. This is why we built Seven Central.”

Google Cloud selected to help SEJ build and grow their data cloud

Today’s rapidly changing business environment has also highlighted the risk of IT support becoming a bottleneck. The long-term strategy is to gradually expand the datasets managed and collected in Seven Central according to business needs. 

In the first phase, SEJ collected POS data from all 21,000+ stores to enable real-time analysis. Moving forward, they would like to collect other relevant data—for example, unstructured data, such as images and videos, or master datasets that are currently stored externally. 

Google Cloud was already a top contender when SEJ started developing Seven Central in 2019. They compared various public cloud services besides Google Cloud, focusing on three main capabilities.

“We placed particular emphasis on service scalability to drive future digital transformation; security when handling data, which is the lifeline of our company; and finally, openness,” says Nishimura. He emphasizes that openness was perhaps the most important factor for choosing Google Cloud. Breaking away from the negative aspects of an entirely vendor-dependent system enabled them to build an agile development system with multiple vendors. 

Google Cloud technologies including BigQuery and API management platform, Apigee, play a vital role in Seven Central. BigQuery’s high-speed processing at petabyte scale and fully managed infrastructure helped keep costs low during development and verification.   

“Data is stored in a way that allows you to share it easily across organizations, which helps solve the issue of data silos from the perspective of scalability. I also like the fact there are some interesting features that could be used in the future—like BigQuery ML, which enables machine learning on BigQuery,” says Nishimura. 

Apigee allows SEJ to separate datasets and business logic, which is one of the key points of Seven Central. While the trend these days is to standardize interfaces using an API, the reality tends to involve many different APIs rather than the introduction of one unified API. With Apigee, SEJ provides a single unified API for all of its data cloud, and they can now understand what data is used thanks to Apigee’s API usage visualizations.  

“Right now, we collect data from all 21,000+ stores,” says Nishimura. “But in anticipation of a future expansion in business operations, we have designed a system that can scale up and run without issue, even if we were to have 30,000 stores, with 1,000 customers per store per day, purchasing five items per person.”

Real-time insights with BigQuery and Cloud Spanner

Google Cloud partner Cloud Ace came on board early in the planning phases. Based on their recommendations, SEJ decided to continue making full use of BigQuery to analyze data collected from all 21,000+ stores throughout Japan, while also using Cloud Spanner’s availability, near-unlimited scalability and transactional consistency to help achieve the real-time results needed for the project.

“Given that both the data and the regularity with which it is accessed are expected to steadily increase in the future, we chose Cloud Spanner as backend storage for data delivery via API. We consider it a good choice,” says Shota Kikuchi, General Manager, Consulting Department, Technology Division, Cloud Ace Co., Ltd.

Finally, they chose to use Google Cloud’s Stream Analytics Solutions messaging service for collecting POS data in real time, which can then be put to immediate use with Cloud Spanner and BigQuery. 

High-speed responses exceed targets and create new value 

Seven Central went live in September 2020 with surprising results. 

They initially set a target time of one hour from when a customer makes a purchase to the point when Seven Central can use that data. But when the final system was first tried—it took barely a minute. Moving forward they estimate that the latest inventory data from the service side will become available within a few minutes of being added to the system.  

“This is real innovation, and I must admit that I am quite surprised. As well as being able to solve existing issues, we also hope it will lead to new improvements and services that have been unimaginable up until now,” says Nishimura.

The team hopes to roll out the Seven Central platform in all companies affiliated with Seven & i Holdings—not just SEJ. They also plan to explore Google Cloud AI and machine learning technologies to take on challenges in new areas. For example, they are investigating the idea of clustering individual stores using BigQuery ML.

Seven Central has already attracted attention from many departments and received a lot of requests. Nishimura and his team say they hope to continue to grow Seven Central while still observing their fundamental principles—not including business logic, maintaining real-time results, and staying true to the uniqueness of SEJ.

Learn more about Google Cloud smart analytics solutions.

Do hamburgers really come from Hamburg? This may still be a matter of debate, but the popularity of American-style burger joints not just in Hamburg but all over Germany, is clear. Germany’s top two fast food companies are both burger chains. One of them is BURGER KING®, a global brand that welcomes more than 11 million customers worldwide every day. The company arrived in Germany in 1976, when its first restaurant opened in Berlin. It now operates more than 100 restaurants across Germany, with franchisees operating more than 600 restaurants of their own.

“In the fast food industry, being able to move quickly is very important. That means delivering the right promotion to our app or launching a viral campaign within days. To do that across more than 700 restaurants, we need the support of the right technology.”

—Oliver Mielentz, IT Manager, BURGER KING® Deutschland GmbH

Previously a subsidiary of the U.S. business, BURGER KING® Germany became an independent company in 2015. As a result, it needed to develop its own IT infrastructure, and the changeover needed to happen fast. “We had to put in place systems that would work for the entire network of franchisees and enable us to easily roll out campaigns,” explains Oliver Mielentz, IT Manager at BURGER KING® Deutschland GmbH.

With the help of Google Cloud Premier partner Cloudwürdig, BURGER KING® Germany chose Google Cloud and G Suite as the right combination to suit its needs.

“In the fast food industry, being able to move quickly is very important,” says Oliver. “That means delivering the right promotion to our app or launching a viral campaign within days. To do that across more than 700 restaurants, we need the support of the right technology.”

Building a franchisee platform in just three months

When a business has multiple franchisees, it’s important to make sure everyone is on the same page, especially in the fast-paced fast food environment. “We have to collate data from all our franchisees and produce reports quickly in order to react to changes in customer behavior,” explains Oliver. “That means processing every transaction that takes place in our restaurants.” Following the restructure, BURGER KING® Germany also needed to build a secure invoicing system with data storage and optimize its communication channels.

“Using Tableau with BigQuery, we’re able to produce reports very quickly. Previously, it took much longer, as data had to be fetched manually. Our reaction time is now almost a business day faster.”

—Oliver Mielentz, IT Manager, BURGER KING® Deutschland GmbH

With support from Witter-IT, BURGER KING® Germany chose Cloudwürdig to build its BKD Connect internal platform on Google Cloud. Thanks to the ready-to-go tools on Google Cloud, it was able to put its invoicing system and data warehouse in place in just three months.

For the BURGER KING® Germany data warehouse, Cloudwürdig built an ETL pipeline that channels ticket data for every sale into BigQuery. “Data is gathered from the restaurants,” says Oliver, “and using Tableau with BigQuery, we’re able to produce reports very quickly. Previously, it took much longer, as data had to be fetched manually. Our reaction time is now almost a business day faster.”

As the ticket data for every transaction is stored in BigQuery, the marketing team can easily see exactly which products are selling well. That’s crucial for tweaking promotions as well as monitoring the supply chain to make sure enough produce is delivered to restaurants in response to changes in demand.

“Thanks to BigQuery, we have a speedy data pipeline that enables us to react on the same day to changes in the market and eliminate bottlenecks in production,” says Oliver.

Switching to G Suite to improve communication

To enable franchisees to sign in to its BKD Connect Platform, BURGER KING® Germany needed a secure authentication system. To solve that problem, it chose to provide franchisees with G Suite accounts. “It’s really easy to set up a new franchisee on the platform. I just create a new G Suite account and Drive folder for it, and it’s ready to go,” says Oliver. G Suite also helps the franchise network to run efficiently, as daily reports are automatically saved to Drive and shared to the appropriate regional network. “Thanks to that system, it’s much easier for any team at headquarters to access the information it needs,” Oliver explains.

BURGER KING® Germany also recently extended its use of G Suite across the whole company. “Following an evaluation of our previous email and productivity software, I made the decision to switch solely to G Suite,” says Oliver. BURGER KING® Germany employees now use Gmail, Calendar, and Drive for their day-to-day productivity needs. “We only just completed the migration, but already, everyone’s happy,” says Oliver. “It’s so easy to share a file using Drive or set up a meeting on Calendar.”

“We’re big fans of Hangouts Meet, and we have two rooms here at our Hanover headquarters equipped with Hangouts Meet hardware,” Oliver adds. “The speech quality is good, and it’s helpful to be able to see every participant, especially when you’re running a meeting with multiple franchisees.”

Optimizing infrastructure to power innovative campaigns

The BURGER KING® app, available for iOS and Android, helps the company to deliver a great customer experience. Through their MyBK accounts, guests can access coupons and special promotions. “We had a really interesting campaign for Easter: guests used the app to hunt for virtual Easter eggs,” explains Oliver. “We knew it was going to be big, and our previous back end wouldn’t have been able to handle the traffic.”

To enable the marketing campaign to go ahead, BURGER KING® Germany moved the back end of the app, along with its website, to Google Cloud. For developing and running its web and app back ends, it now uses App Engine and virtual machines on Compute Engine, as well as Memorystore and Cloud Functions. For monitoring and logging, it uses Stackdriver, and Cloud CDN and Cloud DNS to easily handle its traffic.

“We ran the campaign without any performance issues, even though we were receiving several million hits a day,” says Oliver. Since migrating the back end to Google Cloud, the marketing team also launched the popular “Escape the Clown” campaign. “That campaign blew our minds!” says Oliver. “It wouldn’t have been possible without Google Cloud, because it required a lot of back end capacity.”

To develop the app infrastructure it needs, BURGER KING® Germany relies on Cloudwürdig. “Working with Cloudwürdig is great because the team has the same agile mindset as us,” says Oliver. “When we have a new idea, we just set up a meeting, and in a couple of days the new infrastructure is in place. For Escape the Clown, it only took a few weeks to get everything ready to launch.”

Leveraging integrated tools to grow the business

Using Google Cloud together with G Suite enables BURGER KING® Germany to run its franchise network efficiently, while keeping its IT team lean. “Google Cloud and G Suite are the perfect fit for the way of working at BURGER KING® Germany,” says Oliver. “Many of the company’s operatives are often on the road, visiting restaurants and franchisees. With these tools, they can work flexibly and react quickly to the situation on the ground.”

“In order to grow the business, we need to use the data we receive every day to understand exactly what is happening in our restaurants. With the tools provided by Google Cloud, we can get more guests through the door and offer them a better experience.”

—Oliver Mielentz, IT Manager, BURGER KING® Deutschland GmbH

It also helps to keep infrastructure costs under control. “With Google Cloud, we only pay for what we use, which is really important for us,” Oliver explains. “It means we can scale up quickly if we see an opportunity to react to a trend in customer behavior and launch a new marketing campaign that resonates with the moment. When it’s finished, we can then scale down again, and that definitely saves us money.”

BURGER KING® is now working with Cloudwürdig to add more functionality to the BURGER KING® app using Google Kubernetes Engine. “We like to work with customers long-term to support their digital transformation. BURGER KING® Germany is a great example of how one project can develop into a great collaboration,” says Benny Woletz, Managing Director of Cloudwürdig.

BURGER KING® also plans to expand its presence in Germany and gain a greater market share by further tailoring both its marketing and the way it runs its restaurants to answer its guests’ needs. “In order to grow the business, we need to use the data we receive every day to understand exactly what is happening in our restaurants,” says Oliver. “With the tools provided by Google Cloud, we can get more guests through the door and offer them a better experience.”