Improved Customer Service with Better Data Access
FinPro is a full-service management consulting firm that provides advisory services to financial institutions. Since it was established in 1987, FinPro has become a leader in helping banks of all sizes grow, remain compliant, manage risk, and more, including forming de novo banks and developing a plan for their long-term feasibility, corporate governance, and regulatory consulting.
The company’s consultants are respected leaders in the industry, helping to moderate over 100 board retreats a year, teaching at Stonier Graduate School of Banking and the Graduate School of Banking at Colorado, and hosting 24 webinars for over 2,500 attendees annually.
Challenges
While FinPro is a leading consultant in the financial industry, they felt their processes could be more efficient and agile so they could better service their clients and scale their business: Focus more on consulting services, less on quarterly data preparation.
As with most consulting firms, FinPro relied on significant amounts of mined data to make recommendations and predictions for their clients. The quarterly data was manipulated and housed in Excel workbooks, undergoing an intensive manual process of collection, scrubbing, normalization, and organization to securely provide transaction data to consultants for analysis. Once the data set is prepared, consultants would utilize proprietary FinPro logic formulas to establish data reporting and insights that would help guide financial institutions to the best growth strategies.
Due to the nature of the data, FinPro consultants dedicate significant time to this data preparation process. Consultants would often rely on structured and unstructured data to make their recommendations, requiring different and highly manual processes for each kind of data in order to analyze it for insights. While the established processes ensured a high level of security, they diverted consultants away from assisting their clients and handicapped FinPro’s ability to scale its operation. Due to the cost associated with relying on highly manual processes and institutional knowledge, FinPro contacted Hammer Dev to assess and recommend a secure, automated, and enterprise-ready solution.
Solutions
The Hammer Dev team listened to FinPro’s assessment of its pain points and evaluated each for possible solutions. The key solutions that were eventually deployed were a data warehouse and a Power BI analytics platform.
To better structure and store the customer information FinPro was collecting in Excel, the Hammer Dev team implemented best practice data warehouse to set up a cloud-based client data repository solution. Built to do more than hold information, Hammer Dev structured the data warehouse so that it could facilitate FinPro’s current reporting protocols and enable a more robust framework to query, analyze, and present data.
The FinPro team could now collect, calculate, and normalize the data they received automatically rather than dedicating man hours to the process before providing strategic guidance and advisory services to their clients. By harnessing the horsepower of Power BI as the data presentation layer and visualization tool, FinPro’s consulting team could now provide analytical insights more efficiently than was previously possible.
Results
The implementation of Hammer Dev’s solutions means an immediate drop in the amount of time it takes for value to be delivered to clients, as consultants won’t have to dedicate time to gathering and organizing their client data for analysis, instead focusing on introducing new and more insightful predictions and transformative consultative direction. Coupling the data warehouse solution with Power BI also enables faster, more effective, and comprehensive recommendations for their clients. This increased efficiency enables FinPro’s team to service more clients and scale more quickly than they would have otherwise been able to do.
Additionally, the platform has enabled FinPro to offer a set of digital products that enables potential customers to take advantage of FinPro’s proprietary data platform without engaging consulting resources, creating a new line of business and scalable revenue stream for the company.
Working with Weidenhammer has enabled us to focus more on delivering actionable insights to our customers. Their help with shifting us onto Azure and streamlining our data management processes has helped create a sustainable, scalable strategy to help FinPro continue to make an impact with our clients.”
Bob Musso -External CTO
