Who is MBFS?
Member Business Financial Service (MBFS) is a Credit Union Service Organization (CUSO) that assists credit unions to fund business loans within their markets in order to meet the strategic goals for their organization. MBFS has focused on becoming the preferred partner for credit unions in the Mid-Atlantic and northeast United States business lending marketplace. The past five years have seen a strong growth pattern for the credit unions in loans under management and funded by the CUSO.
Challenges
As a financial services organization, MBFS deals with no shortage of data or reporting requirements. As a CUSO focused on fueling the growth of its Credit Union customers, MBFS is also tasked with providing a regular flow of reports and insights.
And like many organizations, while MBFS has access to a wealth of data, it struggled to generate consistent and professional reports. They also did not know what data from their operational source systems was accessible and available for reporting. In short, MBFS needed a more robust BI solution to fulfill its reporting and analytics needs across the business.
Solutions
Hammer Dev assisted MBFS by architecting, developing, and deploying an Enterprise Data Warehouse. With loan data being sourced in separate systems, the data warehouse can collect and store all loan data together in one repository automatically, while accounting for things like masters of record, conflicting data points, and applying useable intuitive naming conventions. By centralizing its data and applying this business logic, the organization can now see loan insights regardless of status and source system.
With the Data Warehouse created, Hammer Dev then built a Power BI reporting presentation layer over the structure for the business users to have full self-service analytics of portfolio and loan information. Hammer Dev also automated the delivery of the organization’s most widely used and critical reports – a major time saver for the organization. With many MBFS users already well-versed in Excel, Power BI was a natural fit.
Results
This solution would allow the MBFS team to free up hours of manually writing reports and more importantly, allow leadership and their clients to see how their portfolios were performing, while identifying trends and opportunities for improvement. In a broader sense, it had the benefit of moving MBFS and their clients into becoming a more data-driven organization – using data to guide and even predict decision making, as opposed to using data to support decisions that had already been made. As MBFS grows, so too will their business intelligence platform, as it is designed to scale with the organization. Now, MBFS is on the path to true enterprise business intelligence and analytics with improved flexibility, scalability, and maintainability. All the aforementioned made possible thanks to the implementation of an Enterprise Data Warehouse and Microsoft Power BI.
“As a CUSO, it is critically important that MBFS understands all aspects of our loans throughout the various stages of the lifecycle, and that we help our Credit Union customers understand the status and performance of the loan portfolio we are managing on their behalf – from origination, to servicing, to completion. With the data we need coming from multiple sources, we often struggled to pull together the reports we and our customers needed. Hammer Dev helped us greatly by implementing a data warehouse – saving us significant manhours, and greatly improving the professional quality of the reports we deliver to our customers on a regular basis.”
– Ellen Thorn, Senior Vice President of Loan Operations (MBFS)
