Regional US bank: developing a modern cloud data platform

The Challenge

Our client was facing several challenges and required a comprehensive overhaul of their data environment. From a technical perspective, they were running on a legacy technology stack and had significant technical debt, limiting data management and usage. Data was also decentralised with a data model not fit-for-purpose, resulting in inaccurate, inconsistent, and incomplete datasets. As a result, enterprise visibility of data was poor, with no single view of the customer, limiting our client’s ability for data-driven decisions to advance product and service offerings. Business intelligence and analytics capabilities were also siloed and immature, requiring a focus on new analytics tooling and capabilities to support their ambitions.    

The Approach

Our data and banking specialists partnered with our client to define an organisational data vision and strategy. This was underpinned by 4 key strategic pillars, aligning value-driving initiatives with key metrics to track, along with the implications of not taking action. This set the foundation for the development of the solution vision, technical architecture, and guidelines for the new data platform, driven by a pioneering ‘data as products’ strategy to shape the migration effort. We designed and delivered 22 data products, periodic history views and an entirely new customer data structure, alongside the supporting technical frameworks and processes. Following the foundational data build-out, we led business line engagement to refine the new data environment and gather report conversion requirements. We then worked with business areas to transform legacy reports into new, optimised Power BI reports and dashboards to streamline business efficiency and put data insights in the hands of all employees, as well as partnering with the CIO to redefine the data operating model required to support the new data environment.  

The Impact

As a result, we modernised our client’s end-to-end enterprise data architecture for enhanced data visibility, access, and use, setting the path for execution against the data strategy and ultimately, expanding data-driven ways of working. The centralised and logically structured data platform has both fuelled key enterprise efforts, such as the launch of their new digital banking offering, as well as enabled enhanced tooling integrations like Power BI to improve reporting, analytics, and business intelligence capabilities business-wide. 

With improved reports and newfound self-service capabilities enabled through the new environment, business lines with disparate skillsets can now accelerate their use of data and deliver more for customers and partners. Alongside this, we helped redefine the people, skills and processes (within the data organisation) required to support this new model and way of work, ensuring the sustainability and ongoing success of the new platform and tools for our client.