Challenge

Customer data is key to solid business decisions. Though each of this financial firm’s subsidiaries captured valuable metrics through multiple systems, it was fragmented – leaving important insights at risk of being overlooked. A unified customer view can personalize experiences, reduce churn and – perhaps most critical to the financial sector – can quickly expose potential fraud risk. Holistic views can also enable segmentation, boost profitability, and foster the ability to track the effectiveness of business decisions.

BlueGranite initially collaborated with the financial firm on a recently acquired major North American subsidiary whose expensive, legacy data platform made 360-views challenging. Its metrics were siloed in separate applications, reporting tools were limited, and dependence on the outdated technology was widespread.

A key report, generated by a data science model built to analyze customer churn, had to be manually run monthly on a laptop. The days-long process required a complete restart if interrupted at any point. Gaining insights – whether on model performance or the impact of team recommendations – could require integrating up to six additional data sources, and sometimes the creation of additional downstream applications.

Outcomes

To deliver a new era of Customer 360 Insights, the client enlisted BlueGranite to deliver a modern, cloud-based data platform to replace legacy functionality. This new, unified model refreshes data nightly, ensuring up-to-date customer relationship management, and daily performance insights in critical arenas, such as pensions and mutual funds.

Using our Catalyst for Modern Data Platform framework, BlueGranite delivered:

• Moved 200+ metric calculations to the semantic layer, taking advantage of the in-memory analytical capabilities of Azure Analysis Services.
• Also employs secure, scalable Azure Data Lake Storage and Azure Synapse SQL Pool
• Ensures a repeatable, flexible ELT framework through Azure Data Factory
• Allows fast, easy advanced analytics through Azure Databricks collaborative, reliable, high-performance platform.
• Delivers interactive data visualization and rapid reporting through Power BI.

Results

This new, cloud-based Customer 360 data platform on Microsoft Azure now scales to meet the unique needs of each of this financial services firm’s locations.

Powerful data analytics capabilities enabled through Power BI are translating to rapid customer insights, faster data refreshes, and the deployment of reliable analytical model processing.

The solution empowers both analysts and business users, and provides immediate ROI with software licensing cost savings.

In addition to adopting BlueGranite’s transformative modern data platform, this financial firm’s subsidiary created and filled Chief Data Officer and local Data Engineering Manager roles. These leaders empowered the subsidiary’s data developers to transfer their skills to the new solution to propel it forward.

As developers validated and expanded the new semantic layer, the organization’s data scientists transitioned from the local development environment to Azure Databricks, capable of processing and modeling data of all sizes and shapes, and the new Azure Data Lake.

Business experts have been entrusted as data stewards, defining business rules and ensuring solid data governance and validation. The solution enables the firm to decommission aging software, eliminating related licensing costs; supports reliable, collaborative analytical model processing; and speeds fast, interactive insights. The value of this successful alliance spurred another: the organization engaged BlueGranite in one of its largest Asian ventures to further build consistent patterns globally.

The financial giant’s global services operations team provides data and engineering support to all international locations; it now has expertise supporting these digital data ingestion and modeling framework transformations as they are implemented, and can quickly onboard future subsidiaries.

BlueGranite helps you modernize data management. Contact us today to discover how we can help your enterprise reach new heights.