About TekFriday
TekFriday operates in the US lending space, providing short-term credit solutions to meet customers’ immediate financial needs. As a 24x7 fintech business, the company depends on reliable, always-available data to power every layer of its operations: from underwriting and credit risk to finance, operations, and marketing.
Customer data sits at the centre of everything: loan applications, payment histories, funding activity, and agent interactions are all captured in a central lending management system (LMS) and made accessible to teams across the organisation. Data-driven decisions are not aspirational at TekFriday<30 minthey are operational.
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About Tekfriday: Fast, accessible credit powered by data
TekFriday operates in the US lending space, providing short-term credit solutions to meet customers’ immediate financial needs. As a 24x7 fintech business, the company depends on reliable, always-available data to power every layer of its operations – from underwriting and credit risk to finance, operations, and marketing.
Customer data sits at the centre of everything: loan applications, payment histories, funding activity, and agent interactions are all captured in a central lending management system (LMS) and made accessible to teams across the organisation. Data-driven decisions are not aspirational at TekFriday – they are operational.
One source of truth, many business functions
All customer and loan data flows from TekFriday’s in-house LMS into Snowflake, where cross-functional teams run their own analysis and reporting. Key use cases span the organisation:
Underwriting and credit: teams study customer payment behaviour to guide lending strategy – whether to grow the loan portfolio, hold steady, or pull back.
Finance and budgeting: the business is seasonal (more loans during holidays, fewer during tax-refund season), so the finance team uses historical data to forecast funds availability and plan for the year ahead.
Operations: agent activity, application processing rates, and customer interactions are monitored via operational KPIs to identify bottlenecks and improvement opportunities.
Marketing: customer segmentation and campaign performance data (click-through rates, conversion rates) inform targeted outreach efforts.
Reports and dashboards are built in Microsoft Excel, Power BI, and Tableau depending on stakeholder requirements and are consumed daily by business heads and department leads.
The challenge: A constrained SQL server that could not keep up
Before Snowflake, TekFriday ran its analytics off a dedicated SQL Server reporting instance, kept in sync with the production LMS via log shipping. It worked – until it didn’t.
The log shipping introduced a 30-minute lag at best, but more importantly, the SQL Server had hard resource limits. Running complex, compute-intensive reports and analytical models meant competing for the same hardware that was also serving the live lending application. Performance suffered on both sides.
"There used to be continuous time delays while generating reports. And for some of the models our credit teams and data scientists wanted to run, it used to take days. Those constraints got removed immediately once we moved to Snowflake."
There was also a forward-looking concern: TekFriday knew that if they ever wanted to layer AI applications on top of their data, they needed it in a modern cloud warehouse – not locked inside an on-premise SQL Server. The decision to move to Snowflake was both a fix for immediate problems and a foundation for future capability.
The remaining challenge was how to get data from SQL Server into Snowflake reliably, quickly, and without any impact on the live LMS that customer experience depended on.
Before Hevo: An in-house Kafka pipeline that did not deliver
TekFriday’s team first tried to build the data pipeline themselves using Kafka. The goal was straightforward: replicate data from their SQL Server back-end to Snowflake continuously, without affecting the production application.
The Kafka implementation fell short on two fronts: it introduced performance impacts on the core application stack, and the team could not achieve the data consistency they needed. Sorting out these issues consumed significant engineering time, and the Snowflake adoption they were waiting for kept getting delayed as a result.
"We were not successful with Kafka. It was having an impact on our core application performance and the data consistency we were not able to achieve. It was taking a lot of time to sort these out."
With the in-house approach stalling, the team went to market for an external solution. They evaluated StreamSets and, after a Google search, found Hevo Data. Their non-negotiables were clear: quick support, a low-code environment, competitive pricing, and no impact on the production application stack.
Why Hevo: Responsive support, low-code setup, and all requirements met
Hevo checked every box. The implementation effort was, in Kiran’s words, "low" – mostly configuration rather than engineering work. The pipeline did not impact the LMS or customer-facing application. Data integrity issues that had plagued the Kafka attempt were absent. And the Hevo team’s responsiveness during the evaluation and rollout gave TekFriday the confidence to move forward.
"Hevo checked all our requirements. The effort to implement was medium to low – it was mostly configuration. On the data integrity side, we didn’t have those challenges at all."
With Hevo in place, TekFriday achieved a replication of 30 minutes or less from the production SQL Server to Snowflake – with no performance impact on the application. Snowflake adoption, which had been stalled by the failed Kafka experiment, was finally unblocked.
Impact: Snowflake fully unlocked and reporting delays eliminated
Reports delivered without resource contention
With analytical workloads moved off the SQL Server and onto Snowflake, departments no longer compete for compute with the live application. Complex reports and models that previously took days to run on constrained SQL servers now execute without delays. Daily reporting requirements for finance, operations, underwriting, and marketing are all met on time.
Application performance protected
Isolating analytical workloads from the production LMS was a primary requirement. With Hevo replicating data to Snowflake, the customer-facing application runs without interference from reporting or data science workloads - critical for a 24x7 lending business where customer experience cannot be disrupted.
A foundation for AI
TekFriday made the move to Snowflake with one eye on the future: getting data into a cloud warehouse was an explicit prerequisite for leveraging AI solutions. With Hevo handling reliable, low-latency replication, that foundation is now in place.
Hevo Edge: Database migrations in under an hour
TekFriday runs semi-annual disaster recovery (DR) tests that require migrating data between databases and verifying failover. They also periodically upgrade their SQL Server version – most recently moving from SQL Server 2016 to SQL Server 2022. As a 24x7 business, maintenance windows are tight: typically three to four hours, squeezed around business hours.
Hevo Edge – a feature designed for fast, high-throughput data loading – made a material difference during the SQL 2022 migration. Where similar exercises had previously taken much longer, the team was able to reload all the data in approximately one hour.
"Hevo Edge actually made a difference for us. In a matter of about an hour, we were able to load all the data back. That was really good - compared to our prior experiences."
The Hevo team’s support during the migration was equally noted. Because TekFriday had only recently moved to Edge, a Hevo team member was available on-call throughout the exercise, giving the TekFriday team confidence that if anything went off-plan, help was immediately at hand.
"One thing I have observed is that you guys are always present for us – available at any point in time. That kind of support gives us confidence. If something is not going according to plan, we have somebody to help."
The top 3 reasons to choose Hevo
Hevo Edge: fast loading speed made a real difference during database migrations and DR exercises, where tight maintenance windows leave no room for slow data reloads.
Low-code environment: implementation was largely configuration-driven, keeping the burden on the technology team minimal and getting Snowflake adoption unblocked quickly.
Responsive support: the Hevo team’s quick turnaround during both evaluation and live operations – including on-call availability during critical migration windows – was a consistent differentiator.
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