Equal Experts, a global IT services company, recently assisted a FinTech client in developing a low-latency market data alerting system using Redpanda, a Kafka-compatible streaming data platform. The firm initially considered a technology stack including Apache Kafka, but faced challenges with latency and costs, leading to the adoption of Redpanda for its simplicity, performance, and lack of dependencies. After benchmarking, Redpanda met the stringent latency requirements with its lean architecture, enabling the client to achieve a 20% performance boost by using ARM-based Graviton instances in AWS. Despite minor challenges with SASL authentication and configuration, the transition was successful, aided by modular system design and active support from Redpanda engineers. The experience highlighted the importance of evaluating streaming data platforms to ensure they meet specific project requirements, and the ease of migrating to Redpanda due to its Kafka API compliance.