Chartway Federal Credit Union Custom Data Warehousing and Data Analytics
Chartway Federal Credit Union, a not-for-profit, member-owned financial institution, has been proudly serving members for more than half a century. As one of the largest credit unions in the country, Chartway serves more than 190,000 members through more than 40 branches with a full slate of online, mobile, and telephone banking services.
Challenge
In order to support its increasing growth, Chartway Federal Credit Union was looking to take advantage of any Big Data options available. Their newly-formed data analytics team was looking for a way to centralize, analyze, and disseminate data to key departments in the company to support essential business decisions.
Solution
The initial effort was aimed around the creation of a custom data warehouse that worked with and on top of existing vendor products to allow for higher flexibility dependent on current business user needs. The client and the Marathon team decided to expand this custom data warehouse into a more analytic data model using SQL Server Analysis Services' newer tabular model option. A rapidly-approaching release date was set, and a list of several dashboards and a multitude of supporting reports were identified based on the following technologies:
- SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS)
- Power BI Dashboard within SharePoint
- SQL Server Integration Services (SSRS) Reports
- SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) and Powershell for ETL
Reports were primarily meant to be developed in Excel, with the occasional operational report using SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS). Content delivery needed to be similarly easy for business users to access. SharePoint was already utilized enterprise-wide and was the most sensible choice. The Marathon team designed and developed custom functionality for end users to manage their own reports, and additional features were added for the data analytics team’s developers.
The initial dashboards were developed with SSRS Mobile Reports, but eventually Microsoft’s Power BI became the tool of choice. The integration of a Cloud-based service with an on-premise SharePoint site proved challenging, but once the Data Gateway was configured properly, we were able to deliver Power BI reports as embedded content within SharePoint pages.
Results
Several strategy decisions have been made on the basis of the data analytics team’s work, and they are already paying off for the company. Retail promotions, member retention, and collections activities have all benefited from this tailored approach of using data science techniques in conjunction with the organization’s existing data.
The initial success of the project lead to an influx of reporting requests and other assistance from the data analytics team for all business areas of the credit union. The unprecedented amount of content desired by the business users at Chartway necessitated additional enhancements to be made to the SharePoint site and existing data models.
