Kafka Self-Service & Data Products for Financial Services

Turn Kafka into a governed data product platform. Conduktor enables teams to expose, secure, and manage Kafka topics as reusable data products — accelerating developer autonomy while maintaining full auditability and control.

See It in Action

The Problem

Financial institutions rely on data to power fraud detection, risk modeling, customer experience, and regulatory reporting. Yet the path from data creation to consumption remains fragmented. Kafka is everywhere, but the data within it is not discoverable, reusable, or productized.

Most organizations run Kafka at scale — but governance remains ticket-driven and inconsistent:

• ACLs, schemas, and connectors are manually managed
• Platform teams own every change, while developers wait for access
• Risk and Compliance require strict oversight, yet lack full visibility into who uses which topics and for what purpose

Kafka becomes a critical yet opaque backbone: the data exists, but not as usable products — hidden behind manual approvals, unclear ownership, and compliance barriers.

The Challenge

• Data locked in silos — Different business units manage isolated clusters and topics without shared visibility
• No ownership model for data products — Unclear who maintains schema versions, who approves access, or who certifies data for reuse
• Compliance and legal risk — Shadow pipelines and ad-hoc exports bypass GRC oversight
• Limited observability — Missing lineage, consumer lag insights, and visibility into who consumes what—and why
• Fragmented identity and access management — Inconsistent Azure AD, Okta, or LDAP mappings cause audit gaps and duplicated credentials
• Inconsistent schema validation and policy enforcement — Between on-prem, fully-managed or self-managed
• Siloed metadata — No single source of truth linking data contracts, schemas, or quality metrics to the Kafka topics they describe
• Engineering teams reinvent tooling — Multiple internal scripts, YAML templates, or Terraform modules emerge with no standardization or audit
• No unified control plane — Provisioning, ACLs, and schema access managed through disconnected manual workflows
• Disconnected provisioning — ACLs and topic access are handled through ticket queues instead of policies

The Solution

Conduktor transforms Kafka from a messaging infrastructure into a governed data product platform. It provides a unified control plane that connects identity, policy, lineage, and automation, giving developers autonomy while keeping Risk and GRC fully in control.

Core Capabilities

• Automated provisioning — for topics, ACLs, and connectors using policy-driven templates
• Data product cataloging — automatically register topics as reusable data products with ownership, lineage, and access contracts
• Identity integration — with Azure AD, Okta, LDAP, or IAM to enforce group-based access and least-privilege roles
• Consistent RBAC and schema validation — across fully-managed or self-managed environments
• Terraform and GitOps — for version-controlled, auditable provisioning
• Approval workflows — embedded into existing CI/CD or ServiceNow processes
• Lineage & observability dashboards — showing producers, consumers, and compliance status per data product
• GRC visibility — into policy violations, encryption coverage, and user activity across clusters

By connecting Kafka resources to data product definitions, Conduktor lets organizations define ownership, lineage, and quality once — then enforce them automatically everywhere.

With Conduktor, organizations can:

• Expose Kafka topics — as certified data products with schema contracts and access metadata
• Delegate provisioning — to developers under centralized guardrails
• Standardize governance — across fully-managed or self-managed clusters
• Stay compliant — Maintain unified audit trails, lineage, and product usage visibility

Key Use Cases

• Data Product Enablement — Publish Kafka topics as reusable, well-defined data products with ownership, quality metadata, and access controls
• Developer Self-Service — Allow engineers to request and manage topics, ACLs, and connectors with built-in approvals and audit lineage
• Hybrid Cloud Governance — Synchronize identity and schema validation across fully-managed or self-managed
• Compliance Automation — Generate auditable logs of every access, schema update, and data product change for InfoSec and regulators
• Operational Efficiency — Eliminate tickets through automated provisioning and lifecycle cleanup
• Data Science Access — Enable ML and analytics teams to subscribe to curated, masked Kafka data products safely
• Regulatory Sandboxes — Reuse governed data products in test and replay environments without violating masking or retention policies
• Workflow Integration — Link with Terraform, GitHub Actions, or Jenkins for traceable, compliant CI/CD provisioning