Malt’s data team saves 70% of data engineering time with Fivetran

Our data scientists deliver value that represents millions of euros in revenue and growth, thanks to the low latency and quality of data delivered by Fivetran.
— Olivier Girardot, Head of Data, Malt

Malt’s online freelancer marketplace connects 30,000 organisations with 250,000 freelancers across France, Spain, and Germany. A unique data-driven marketplace, it leverages leading-edge technology to match skills to projects in an efficient, transparent, and compliant way for both parties.

The scale-up has created a unique tech solution that ensures a compliant and seamless workflow management from the sourcing of the freelancers to the project payment.

The challenge: Ingestion process slows down analysis

When Olivier Girardot joined as Head of Data, his mission was to ‘do more with less’ and enable a small analytics team to access insights and deliver the maximum value to the business. An existing custom-built ingestion framework lacked performance and reliability. Malt wanted to deliver value from the data through analysis and eliminate time spent debugging data pipelines.

This required a consistent, automated approach that could be run by two engineers. One main objective was to analyse data from digital advertising to maximise the advertising spend; the second was regulatory compliance. A solution was needed that protected the personal information of freelancers when their data was moved to the data warehouse. It had to be kept inside the European Union.

Malt tested and evaluated several connector products. Only Fivetran was able to deliver the reliability and compliance needed to fulfill Malt’s needs. Olivier Girardot says: “The reliability of the product and ease of configuration makes it very easy to be confident in the results. Fivetran transmits rather than stores the data, so it keeps us compliant.”

The solution: Growing data sources and use cases

The growth in data volumes was higher than Malt anticipated. After implementing Fivetran connectors, they started to discover the endless possibilities to connect more and more use cases. Besides analysing the response from online advertising platforms, the company takes data from Mandrill, an email marketing tool, to track the most effective way to communicate with clients.

Malt now computes core metrics directly or indirectly from data harvested with Fivetran. Semantic analysis informs everything from acquisition campaigns to actionable reporting. Salesforce data is refreshed daily at 15-minute intervals to register and update the status of thousands of clients, ensuring profiles are always up to date. New data sources like MongoDB and GitHub are now available for analysis because Fivetran connectors make access so quick and easy.

“The cost of new integration is evaluated relative to the availability of the connector in Fivetran,” says Olivier Girardot. “We have every intention of scaling with Fivetran, our trusted partner, to fuel our success. They are here to stay!”

The results: Business critical in multiple ways

Without Fivetran, Malt would have taken two years to get to the point where it is now in terms of analytics. It takes just a day to synchronise multiple data sources and minutes to harvest data for reporting. Tasks that took 70% of the data team’s engineering time have now been automated. The feedback loop with Salesforce is just 15 minutes.

Data transferred with Fivetran is business critical, according to Girardot, and utilised in multiple ways: for marketing, for CRM and increasingly for game-changing data science. Machine learning is taking the business to another level with advanced analytics powering Malt Plus, a premium service that helps recruiters find the best talent in the quickest possible way – 95% of clients receive replies from interested freelancers within 24 hours.

“Fivetran is a cornerstone for almost everything we want to achieve. There is rarely a project where we don’t use Fivetran to integrate our core data,” said Olivier Girardot. “Our data scientists deliver value that represents millions of euros in revenue and growth –  thanks to the low latency and quality of data delivered by Fivetran.”

The impact of Fivetran is felt most by the data team but has also allowed employees across the business to become more data driven. “Fivetran allows them to be autonomous and design their dashboards in a self-service way,” said Olivier Girardot.

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About Fivetran: Our fully managed pipelines and automated connectors for databases, applications, events, files and functions help extract value more quickly from data, accelerating the path to becoming a data-driven business and achieving competitive advantage through insight-based decision making. Find out more at Fivetran.com