My Pension Expert Limited

My Pension Expert provides pension annuity advisory services to workers approaching retirement in the United Kingdom, helping people shop for better deals and higher rates. A financial services business like My Pension Expert has to analyze a lot of data, but as a small business, it has to focus its developers' time on applications that offer strategic value. Building a data pipeline? Not so strategic.

"We looked at Apache Airflow, but developing a data ingestion solution with it would have involved too much hand-coded Python. We needed to save time, so we sought a code-free software-as-a-service solution for data engineering," says Joe Heffer, analytics developer at the company.

Stitch did just what My Pension Expert asked for. "We simply connected it to our various data sources and started ingesting data into the warehouse — simple. Stitch's excellent technical support team helped us to resolve some teething problems — things like network configuration due to our company firewall.

"We saved development hours, so we were able to quickly move on to adding business value by designing business-specific data transformations — the 'T' part of the extract–load–transform approach."

That's not the only way Heffer is using his development skills to add value. Stitch is built on the open source Singer platform. Heffer developed a new Singer integration for Yahoo Gemini, and is working with Stitch's product team to have it incorporated into Stitch.

Heffer says he appreciates that modern cloud-native data services like Stitch allow even smaller companies to implement near-cutting-edge analytics solutions without huge outlays on risky data warehousing projects.