Consumer finance assistant
Keeping a consumer finance assistant current without taking it offline
- Year
- 2024–26
- Client
- Consumer finance company
- Domain
- Consumer finance
- My role
- Owner, ingestion and retrieval services
- Stack
Minutesfrom publish to searchable
Zerodowntime during index updates
3platforms: web, iOS, Android
The problem
Customers ask the assistant about their finances and the products on offer, and the answers depend on content that changes whenever editors publish. A stale article or a deleted link becomes a wrong answer in front of a customer.
What I built
- An ingestion service that pulls content from several sources, validates it and builds the search indexes the assistant relies on.
- Retrieval that finds the right content for each customer question.
- Near-real-time updates from the CMS, including removing unpublished content so it stops being searchable.
- Direct links into the right app screen or web page, for web, iOS and Android.
- Error detection and automatic rebuilds from source, plus logging and metrics on every run.
The hard part
A search index can’t be half-updated while customers are asking questions. Each refresh builds separately, is validated, and only then takes traffic, so the assistant stays available and never serves a partial knowledge base.
Outcome
Published content reaches the assistant within minutes, removed content disappears from answers, and updates no longer mean downtime.
Client names, data and code are confidential, so details are generalised.
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