Case Studies Bank Holding Company Partners with Concurrency to Gain Operational Insights from Loan Portfolio Data

Bank Holding Company Partners with Concurrency to Gain Operational Insights from Loan Portfolio Data

Background

A Midwest-based bank holding company sought to transform its ability to derive meaningful operational insights from its databases of loan portfolio data.

The bank’s credit reporting team needed more flexibility and a broader range of insights than was possible with its existing business intelligence platform. The team members needed more than just an extension of one or more existing reports. Rather, they desired genuine digital transformation of the company’s operations in the credit monitoring area.

The credit operations team—supported by a group of database developers—was already positioned well with regard to high-quality, clean data. However, the team was hampered by the existing BI platform’s reliance on structured data warehouses that required ongoing attention and maintenance. Furthermore, they were limited in operationalizing insights generated through data analysis due to software limitations. For example, any desired changes to reports required weeks of implementation.

The bank’s credit operations team was working closely with Microsoft to explore the potential of Microsoft’s Power BI platform to provide a better-structured and more powerful reporting solution. Microsoft then introduced Concurrency’s experts to the bank’s team to begin a proof-of-concept process.

Solution
For the proof-of-concept phase, the bank provided us with a sample data set. In a day and a half, we put together a deep demonstration of how Power BI could revolutionize their ability to build their own reports, make changes to models, and redeploy analyses—giving them powerful new abilities to derive critical insights that were previously unavailable or too cumbersome to pursue.

Because the bank was already making extensive use of SQL Server, we were able to move quickly from the proof-of-concept into a project to build and optimize new reports and dashboard structure.

Over the course of the approximately eight-week project, we built approximately 65 reporting pages that were part of 10 reports. These 10 reports were further consolidated into a single card on a dashboard. This dashboard gave all users convenient and immediate access to detailed reporting from a user-friendly tool. The dashboard consisted of tiles, each of which provided a description of reporting tabs available in that section.

The project’s work plan for the dashboard creation focused on an initial sprint phase for strategy definitions, which included configuring the server and defining solution governance, deployment processes, documentation plans, support processes, and more.

Then, we proceeded through a series of five-day sprints to develop the reports themselves. Each of these included defining the tabular models and source content, building the dashboards, creating documentation, reviewing results, and releasing dashboards to the assigned beta testers.

In a final phase, we addressed all remaining items, enacted role-based security parameters (to apply across the bank’s multiple office locations—different data available to different offices) and rolled out the new reports to the team.

Throughout each phase of the process, we worked closely with the bank’s credit reporting team, database developers, and other IT professionals. We conducted the entire engagement workshop-style, with the stakeholders gathered together in a room and our experts configuring systems and building reports on a large screen so everyone could see and learn from the process. By the end of the project, the bank’s team members had a solid grasp on how to use Power BI—including how to continue building out their own reports going forward.

Results and Next Steps
The user-friendly dashboard structuring was a critical component of this project because it ensures the enhanced analytical capabilities are truly used—supporting the team’s desire to truly transform its ability to operationalize key insights.
The new system allows the credit reporting team to present high-level findings to senior managers along with detailed underlying data for additional insights.
This successful transformation of the credit monitoring team’s ability to garner actionable insights from a flexible reporting system was the first phase of anticipated further data analytics projects for additional groups within the larger bank holding company.