In a highly regulated industry where every millisecond matters, Swedbank is shifting its data strategy to move fast without breaking trust. In this episode, Rami Al Lolah, Lead Architect at Swedbank’s Integration Center of Excellence, shares how the bank built a future-proof foundation using Apache Kafka® with Confluent Cloud.

From early investments in building reusable data products to shift left, , Swedbank’s strategy goes beyond infrastructure. It’s about enabling interoperability, eliminating data silos, and empowering teams to think differently about how data should flow across a modern financial institution.

You’ll Learn:

• How Swedbank reduces risk by accelerating data availability across teams
• Why “shift left” is a cultural and architectural shift,not just a development pattern
• Why choose Confluent over other solutions
• Where Swedbank sees the biggest opportunities for AI and streaming in the future

Whether you're leading modernization for a financial institution or scaling real-time data for your organization, this episode offers a blueprint for transformation.

About the Guest:
Rami Al Lolah is a seasoned professional, technologist and domain expert for 25+ years within the application and systems integration domain. His expertise is in delivering, designing, writing major integration solutions from world leading integration technology providers, leading technical/services teams, and directing major integration technical implementations.

Guest Highlight:
“We need to embrace the [shift left] mindset and methodology, and try to move critical considerations, for example — compliance, security, governance, and data quality earlier in the development process. This means that when teams build something like a Kafka topic, or even an API or a file based integration, they are not just focusing on making it work technically. They are already thinking about who owns it, who owns the data, what the contract, what the schemas look like, who will access this data, and how the access will be managed.”

Episode Timestamps:
*(06:40) - Data Streaming Goodness
*(33:15) -   The Runbook: Winning Strategies
*(41:15) -    Data Streaming Street Cred
*(47:40) - Quick Bytes
*(54:30) - Joseph’s Top 3 Takeaways

Dive Deeper into Data Streaming:

• EP1—Stream On: Unleashing Innovation with Data Streaming | Life Is But A Stream
• EP2—Processing Without Pause: Continuous Stream Processing and Apache Flink® | Life Is But A Stream
• EP3—The Connective Tissue: Shift Left to turn Data Chaos to Clarity | Life Is But A Stream

Links & Resources:

• Connect with Joseph: @thedatagiant
• Joseph’s LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/thedatagiant
• Rami’s LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/ramiallolah
• Learn more at Confluent.io

Our Sponsor:
Your data shouldn’t be a problem to manage. It should be your superpower. The Confluent data streaming platform transforms organizations with trustworthy, real-time data that seamlessly spans your entire environment and powers innovation across every use case. Create smarter, deploy faster, and maximize efficiency with a true data streaming platform from the pioneers in data streaming. Learn more at confluent.io

Strategic partnerships don’t work without trust. And in the data streaming world, trust begins with transparency.

In this episode, Elena Cuevas, Sr. Manager of Cloud Partner Solutions Engineering at Confluent, joins Joseph Morais to unpack what it takes to collaborate with hyperscalers like AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. From managing competitive overlaps to future-proofing enterprise data architectures, Elena shares her battle-tested strategies for driving alignment across complex stakeholder ecosystems.

You’ll learn:

• How to collaborate effectively across competitive cloud partnerships
• Why transparency builds trust and drives adoption in partner-led sales
• What shift left unlocks for streaming data governance
• How Confluent supports GenAI use cases with real-time data

Whether you're working with a cloud provider or building your own ecosystem, Elena’s playbook will change how you think about partnership, transparency, and long-term scale.

About the Guest:
Elena Cuevas currently leads the Cloud Partner Solutions Engineering team at Confluent, where she and her team focus on strengthening technical relationships with cloud providers.

Prior to joining Confluent, Elena spent several years at Google, working directly with some of the company’s largest Google Cloud customers in both pre-sales and post-sales capacities.

She is passionate about helping members of historically underrepresented communities see that a path in STEM is within reach if they choose to pursue it. Elena has served as an #IamRemarkable facilitator, an instructor for the Computer Science Summer Institute, and is a frequent speaker at universities and high schools.

Guest Highlight:
“Sometimes we talk about competing and about one or the other, but we do better things when it's ‘and’, and not an ‘or’.”

Episode Timestamps:
*(07:55) - Data Streaming in a World of Clouds
*(14:25) -   The Playbook: Winning Strategies
*(23:25) -    Voices from the World of Data Streaming
*(28:30) - Quick Bytes
*(31:15) - Joseph’s Top 3 Takeaways

Dive Deeper into Data Streaming:

• EP1—Stream On: Unleashing Innovation with Data Streaming | Life Is But A Stream
• EP2—Processing Without Pause: Continuous Stream Processing and Apache Flink® | Life Is But A Stream
• EP3—The Connective Tissue: Shift Left to turn Data Chaos to Clarity | Life Is But A Stream

Links & Resources:

• Connect with Joseph: @thedatagiant
• Joseph’s LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/thedatagiant
• Elena’s LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/ecuevasc
• Learn more at Confluent.io

Our Sponsor:
Your data shouldn’t be a problem to manage. It should be your superpower. The Confluent data streaming platform transforms organizations with trustworthy, real-time data that seamlessly spans your entire environment and powers innovation across every use case. Create smarter, deploy faster, and maximize efficiency with a true data streaming platform from the pioneers in data streaming. Learn more at confluent.io

Blockchain may be decentralized, but reliable access to its data is anything but simple. In this episode, Ethan Chan, Co-Founder & CEO of Allium, shares how his team transforms blockchain firehoses into clean, queryable, real-time data feeds.

From the pitfalls of hosting your own data streaming infrastructure to the business advantages of Confluent Cloud, Ethan reveals the strategic decisions that helped Allium scale from 3 to nearly 100 blockchains, without burning out their engineering team.

You’ll learn:

• Why Allium opted for Confluent Cloud from day one
• How data streaming supports mission-critical blockchain use cases
• What makes stream sharing a force multiplier for customer success
• How Confluent connectors accelerated their integrations with Snowflake, BigQuery, and Databricks

Whether you’re building real-time monitoring tools or reconciling petabytes of cross-chain data, this episode offers a blueprint for scaling with Apache Kafka® and Confluent.

About the Guest:

Ethan Chan is the CEO and Co-Founder of Allium. With over six years of experience in the AI and natural language processing space, Ethan has come to believe that high-quality data is the key constraint in building the best-performing models. This insight drives Allium’s mission: to provide the highest-quality blockchain data infrastructure for crypto analytics and engineering teams at institutions and funds. Allium focuses on delivering clean, reliable data in a simple, accessible format—data served on a silver platter.

Before founding Allium, Ethan was the Director of Engineering at Primer, where he founded and led the Primer Command product and team, and re-architected the core machine learning pipelines powering Primer Analyze. Earlier in his career, he lectured at Stanford University and conducted research at the Stanford Intelligent Systems Lab as a graduate student.

Guest Highlight:
“We definitely always wanted to go for a managed service from the get-go… If you break [streaming], every other engineering company is going to complain and you become infamous—for no reason.”

Episode Timestamps:
*(01:10) - Allium’s Data Streaming Strategy
*(05:20) - Data Streaming Goodness
*(26:50) -   The Runbook: Tools & Tactics
*(29:55) -   Data Streaming Street Cred: Improve Data Streaming Adoption
*(32:10) - Quick Bytes
*(36:40) - Joseph’s Top 3 Takeaways

Dive Deeper into Data Streaming:

• EP1—Stream On: Unleashing Innovation with Data Streaming | Life Is But A Stream
• EP2—Processing Without Pause: Continuous Stream Processing and Apache Flink® | Life Is But A Stream
• EP3—The Connective Tissue: Shift Left to turn Data Chaos to Clarity | Life Is But A Stream

Links & Resources:

• Ep 8 - How Airy Powers Real-Time AI Agents with Data Streaming and Confluent
• Connect with Joseph: @thedatagiant
• Joseph’s LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/thedatagiant
• Ethan’s LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/ethanyschan
• Learn more at Confluent.io

Our Sponsor:
Your data shouldn’t be a problem to manage. It should be your superpower. The Confluent data streaming platform transforms organizations with trustworthy, real-time data that seamlessly spans your entire environment and powers innovation across every use case. Create smarter, deploy faster, and maximize efficiency with a true data streaming platform from the pioneers in data streaming. Learn more at confluent.io.