Rackspace Technology and M1 Finance accelerate fraud detection

M1 Finance offers an innovative money management application for intelligent investors seeking access to features such as automation, leverage investing and banking services, all wrapped into one integrated solution. The company’s platform has experienced significant growth, with over 200,000 accounts totaling approximately $2 billion in assets and counting. To ensure a secure user experience, M1 Finance aims to provide a seamless interface with robust security and fraud detection.

With its rapid user growth, M1 Finance found it was collecting a significantly higher volume of data from its internal systems than what could fit in its existing data warehouse. Handling such high data volumes could become costly with traditional data warehousing. The company also had Java applications that accumulated data over many years which could be highly useful for fraud analytics. This data was trapped in the silos of legacy databases and Onica, a Rackspace Technology company, provided a solution to query rapidly moving high volume data from the existing system.

“Onica’s team really went above and beyond in ideating and implementing the solution,” said Richard Whaling, Lead Data Engineer at M1 Finance. “A great degree of passion and craftsmanship was visible in the code style and design of the implementation, which is rare to find in these kinds of engagements and really awesome to work with.”

“Intelligent investors will benefit greatly from the data analytics advances M1 Finance has made to accelerate its secure processing of highly sensitive data,” said Tolga Tarhan, CTO, Rackspace Technology. “We’re proud to partner with M1 Finance to transition its legacy process and fully embrace intelligent automation capabilities, delivering the most streamlined customer experience through a near real-time solution.”

The new solution streamlined the process significantly, automating what was previously done manually over multiple hours to a practically real-time solution. The design of the solution provides scalability, low cost, and integration with existing data sets. The solution also offers superior flexibility, replacing the  process of having to queue tasks for an engineer with one where data analysts can perform ad hoc dynamic queries. M1 Finance business users now can build robust queries at scale and address their multi-petabyte size data sources and return meaningful, timely results. This provides a significant advantage in fraud detection where every minute reduced in processing time can mean proportionately higher success and improved security.