The Project

When Colonial First State divested from Commonwealth Bank, it needed its own marketing automation platform, and a data foundation reliable enough to run it on, built to a tight licence deadline. Anchora delivered that data foundation as part of a wider engagement for CFS that also covered the MarTech implementation and the consulting that shaped it. The data itself only reached CFS through APIs, each with its own authentication, paging, rate limits and incremental change to manage, so Anchora supported the build of production ingestion jobs on Databricks that land it reliably in the structures the CDP expects.

The Ask

CFS needed to bring in data from its enterprise data platform, middleware, CRM, event and inbound systems, most of which only exposed that data through APIs. Manual exports and fragile scripts couldn’t be trusted to feed a platform marketing would rely on for live campaigns. CFS needed ingestion that could handle:

• Authentication and pagination across multiple API sources.
• Rate limits, without dropping or duplicating data.
• Incremental change, so each run processes only new or updated records.
• Failures that surface as alerts rather than silently delivering partial data.
• Security and compliance sign-off from CFS’s own security team before anything went live.

Scope

Anchora supported the build of that ingestion as production jobs on Databricks, working through CFS’s security requirements before anything went live. The work covered:

• Data engineering: Jobs running on Databricks that pull data in from CFS’s enterprise data, middleware, CRM, event and inbound systems and shape it into the structures the CDP needs.
• API integration: extraction from REST APIs that handles authentication, paging and rate limits without dropping or duplicating records.
• Pipeline orchestration: job scheduling that processes only what has changed each run, rather than reloading everything.
• CDP data ingestion: a single customer view built on this data foundation, with native integrations back to CFS’s data warehouse and automated export into the BI tools the business already uses.
• Operational monitoring: logging, alerting and retry handling, backed by an operational runbook.

Outcome

Customer data now reaches Adobe Experience Platform in real time rather than in a weekly extract, and CFS has a single customer view built on this data foundation for the first time, replacing manual exports that used to be pieced together in spreadsheets. Failures surface as alerts rather than as missing audiences discovered by the marketing team, and the ingestion pattern is reusable, so adding a further API source becomes a configuration exercise rather than a new build.

This data foundation underpinned the wider modernisation Anchora delivered for CFS.

• Campaign delivery doubled within three months,
• click-through rates lifted from 3.2 percent to 7.6 percent,
• email deliverability improved from the low 90s to 99 percent, and
• the business realised more than $250,000 in cost savings through better-targeted digital campaigns.

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If your CDP depends on manual exports or one person’s script, that’s a risk waiting to surface at the worst possible time. Anchora builds ingestion that runs on its own and tells you when something needs attention. Get in touch to talk about your data pipelines.