HELPING AN AFRICAN BANK TRANSFORM ITS BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE STRATEGY

CASE STUDY

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CASE STUDY

HELPING AN AFRICAN BANK TRANSFORM ITS BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE STRATEGY

Most often companies modernizing their business processes and

technologies rely on solution suites or data visualization tools like

Tableau and Qlikview to deliver results.

Industry studies and our experience suggest that most organizations that

adopt this approach end up disillusioned due to poor adoption on account

of people, process, and technology issues, including:

1. Business users fail to adopt due to products requiring high technical

skills

2. Lack of awareness and change management

3. Metrics are not useful, or tracking or too many metrics are tracked

4. Tool is incompatible with the latest devices

5. Lack of proper data management infrastructure

The principal reason for suboptimal outcomes is the lack of a

comprehensive, structured, and tailored strategy that starts with a focused

assessment of key issues, gaps in data processes, and the alignment of

processes with people and technology.

EXL’s client, a large African bank, wanted to avoid these BI transformation

issues and achieve goals including:

1. Align business processes to produce incremental value generating

opportunities and provide insight and foresight into products and

services, customers, and overall profitability.

2. Align technology architecture and data systems

3. Align people to adapt to change

The bank wanted to understand its customer profitability and

improve lifecycle management through descriptive and predictive

analytics. The company also wished to digitize the bank’s processes

to reduce time spent on manual tasks and receive business insights

in a timely manner for faster decision making, as well as automated

processes providing real-time reports on key business drivers.

Context

Prior to engaging EXL, the initial approach to achieving the bank’s

objectives looked only at the technological aspect of collating,

manipulating the data, and using the right BI tool to visualize it.

While this produced some results, it failed to look at the problem

holistically. A number of challenges cropped up, such as data not

flowing as intended, the business not conforming to definitions,

multiple sources for the same information, technological

incompatibilities of the BI tool with the current infrastructure, and

other issues.

These problems required a structured approach. In order to address

these problems, a three-pillar framework was devised focusing

on solutions for the people, processes, and technology aspects.

Together, these pillars would support the reporting, analysis and

planning needs of the organization.

Business intelligence (BI) usiness intelligence (BI) plays an integral part in plays an integral part in

every organization. Thinking every organization. Thinking more strategically about more strategically about

integrating and communicating integrating and communicating data can help any banking data can help any banking

organization improve its BI practices. organization improve its BI practices.

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HELPING AN AFRICAN BANK TRANSFORM ITS BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE STRATEGY

Initially, EXL worked closely with the client’s leaders to identify a

common book of work and which key performance indicators (KPIs)

were necessary to check the health of the organization. Through

this effort, the client organization arrived at the insight that too

many reports were being generated that didn’t add any value to the

organization, resulting in a lot of extra effort and cost.

Aligning the business process to a common book of work added a

lot of value to the organization and saved costs for the company.

EXL also looked at the metrics the company was using for its reports.

In this project, most metrics included in the existing reports did

not add any value, but required a lot of effort involved in sourcing,

computing and reporting. The BI development team identified the

key metrics which were essential to run the business and could be

standardized across the different countries the bank served. The

team revisited all the reports being produced, collaborated with

the business stakeholders, and assessed the value of reports. This

extensive exercise reduced the number of reports to one fifth of the

existing volume.

Orchestration

This project used Tableau as the data visualization tool. As the data

was structured, it could not handle heavy data manipulation. The

BI development team created a proof of concept for the proposed

design and got a confirmation for the same from the stakeholders,

ensuring minimum future rework.

Business Process People

Alignment of Business Process

Information Governance

Metrics/Key Performance indicators

Business Rules

Analytical Process

Alignment of BI Strategy

Collaboration of Business Units

Awarness of Tools

Training

Adoption

Data Architecture/Technology

Source Systems

Landing Area

Data Mart

Data Cube

Visualization Layer

Information

BI FRAMEWORK

The Tableau reports were published on a server and appropriate

accesses were given to maintain data privacy, as the bank’s branches

from different countries of the African continent can’t see each

other’s data. The visuals were refreshed on a T+1 basis, which

enabled faster decision making.

Additionally, the team also looked at the client’s information

governance practices. Information governance plays a vital role

in maintaining high quality of data, from source to the end-user,

ensuring compliance with legal regulations, gauging performance

and monitoring strategic initiatives.

The BI development team worked closely with the client’s

information governance team to solve issues including:

• • Data Quality: Some data points had missing values and incorrect information.

• • Data Latency: Some data streams had a latency issue. For instance, in one case, accounts created in previous months were reflected as accounts for the current month when transferred to the data warehouse.

• • Data Capture: Data from third-party vendors was not flowing directly into the data warehouse.

• • Data Security: The BI development team ensured that the bank’s clients and regulators had access to only the data they were allowed to see using a machine intelligence tool.

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HELPING AN AFRICAN BANK TRANSFORM ITS BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE STRATEGY

Also, the team had to ensure that no personal information of

customer, like Social Security numbers or credit card numbers, are

shown in the visualization tools.

As a part of data development process, a data mart was developed

using a Teradata data mart solution, moved into pre-production

for testing, and finally into production after user acceptance testing

and getting approval for the team responsible for governance and

maintenance of the data warehouse. The data mart was configured

to be refreshed on a T+1 basis for real time decision making

EXL worked with the client’s leadership to ensure that the BI strategy

was communicated across the business units and everyone aligned

to a common goal. By clearly communicating the changes, providing

the right incentives to adapt to the new practices, and facilitating

adoption through trainings, meetings, and well-designed handover

documents, the client experienced a smooth transition.

Outcomes:

The resulting changes from the BI implementation framework led to

the following benefits for the client organization:

1. Faster decision making: Reports were created almost

on a real-time basis, enabling faster decision making. The

turnaround time for many reports was reduced from T+45,

or more than 45 days after an event to, T+1. The report were

visually appealing and had the ability to drill down.

2. Cost reduction: Reduced the number of reports produced

from ~100 to ~10, simplifying the BI landscape and reducing

cost.

3. Quality of reports: The quality of reports improved as

there was reduced manual intervention. Data flow was

streamlined, and existing issues were raised and closed with

the information governance team.

4. Sharing: Reports were no longer sent out once a month, and

were instead updated almost on a real-time basis and could be

shared electronically through a web URL, enabling self-service.

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HELPING AN AFRICAN BANK TRANSFORM ITS BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE STRATEGY

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EXL (NASDAQ: EXLS) is a leading operations management and analytics company that helps our clients build and grow sustainable businesses. By orchestrating our domain expertise, data, analytics and digital technology, we look deeper to design and manage agile, customer-centric operating models to improve global operations, drive profitability, enhance customer satisfaction, increase data-driven insights, and manage risk and compliance. Headquartered in New York, EXL has more than 32,600 professionals in locations throughout the United States, the UK, Europe, India, the Philippines, Colombia, Australia and South Africa. EXL serves multiple industries including insurance, healthcare, banking and financial services, utilities, travel, transportation and logistics, media and retail, among others.

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