Case study: The privacy-enhancing analytics platform

Founded by Mastercard and IBM in 2018, Truata specialises in privacy-enhancing technologies for the de-identification and anonymisation of data. This allows organisations to access customer behavioural insights while meeting the strictest global privacy standards.

The challenge

Since starting up, Truata has had an aggressive development roadmap for several products within its target data analysis and anonymisation solution sets. The design and development of these products required an iterative approach informed by market feedback and the fast evolving nature of the opportunity space. 

This in turn set demands on Trauta’s product and engineering teams to scale in a rapid but flexible manner, resulting in a decision to engage a software partner to help with the challenge. 

Sonalake’s initial engagement was focused on a solution that allows users to analyse consumer spending behaviours through a series of KPI driven dashboards and machine learning models without retaining any identifying information. 

The goal was to assist Truata in creating a portal for processing anonymised data that could configure data streams, provide meaningful analytical insights and deliver a quality user experience. This privacy-enhanced analytics portal would allow organisations to gather insights into consumer behaviour whilst removing any associated privacy risk. 

Truata needed a software partner with product experience who could provide expert consultation, engineering support and design services. The portal also needed to be customised for different geographical markets.

“We have been delighted with the support of Sonalake, providing product design and development support to help us scale our engineering capacity and get products to market with speed and quality”
-Paul Cash, CTO  

The solution

Our Engineering Teams service provided Truata with product development expertise in the form of a fully-equipped agile team, which was incubated and fully embedded with Truata’s engineering and development team within weeks. We provided frontend and backend developers with the necessary experience in process and software product development.

The team included team leads and project management roles, working in close collaboration with the product owner and engineering management. Peer consultation was proactively driven by the team and the leads. Third-party objective consultation was also provided across process, engineering practices and UX/UI design, with a CTO-to-CTO level of engagement.

Results

We formed an effective and productive partnership with Truata. Together, we accelerated development of the products needed to expand its services. Truata was able to offer its partners UX-focused tools to generate data-driven insights with a privacy-first mindset. 

We helped Truata evolve from a data-focused organisation to one with the capabilities to properly pursue in-house product development. Truata has since designed a number of new products, which we’ve supported with the provision of design services and additional engineering capacity.