Apache Kafka is a battle-tested distributed stream-processing platform popular in the financial industry to handle mission-critical transactional workloads. Kafka’s ability to handle large volumes of real-time market data makes it a core infrastructure component for trading, risk management, and fraud detection. Financial institutions use Kafka to stream data from market data feeds, transaction data, and other external sources to drive decisions.
A common data pipeline to ingest and store financial data involves publishing real-time data to Kafka and utilizing Kafka Connect to stream that to databases. For example, the market data team may continuously update real-time quotes for a security to Kafka, and the trading team may consume that data to make buy/sell orders. Processed market data and orders may then be saved to a time series database for further analysis.