Major Regional Bank Modernizes Its Data-Driven Decision-Making With Snowflake
Customer's Challenge
One of the leading regional banks in the Southeast needed to modernize their data-driven decision making process. Limited by slow legacy systems and processes, and without any centralized data platform, they looked to validate the value of Snowflake for analyzing data from a variety of sources and for a range of business use cases.Â
phData's Solution
phData helped the major bank prove out the value of Snowflake as a viable data platform for their organization. Through a five-week pilot program, the phData team created automated, scalable pipelines for two Snowflake use cases. The work included reviewing data sources, designing ingestion architecture using Fivetran and dbt Cloud, and validating data with Tableau.
Results
These pilot use cases gave the client exactly what they needed to move forward on modernizing their data-driven decision-making process with a cloud-based data platform.Â
phData and Snowflake helped present the benefits and timelines to implement the modern data platform to the bank’s senior leadership. Â
The resulting data platform will be a single platform that will scale to meet the needs of all the client’s business areas.
As a whole, the new solution will:
- Centralize data in an accessible platform, speeding up data-driven business decisions
- Bring all business units onto the same page with data, enabling self-service for teams
- Reduce the cost and complexity presented by the bank’s legacy on-prem solution
The Full Story
The client is one of the leading regional banks in the Southeast, offering robust banking solutions: consumer banking, mortgage services, small business banking, commercial banking, and wealth management.
The bank’s decision-making process was slow and not as data-informed as it could be. Without a centralized data platform, individual business units and leadership alike had a hard time getting up-to-date and timely data from a variety of sources. Some teams were using duplicate systems and disparate data sources, leading to inconsistencies in data quality and value.Â
If different business groups were receiving different results after querying the same data, how could the business as a whole make informed decisions?
At the same time, their on-premise hardware made working with data unnecessarily complex, slow and unscalable.Â
Why phData?
After the client approached Snowflake as a potential new, cloud-based data platform, Snowflake recommended phData to prove out the value of the platform through a pilot project. As Snowflake’s RSI Innovation Partner of the Year, phData has next-level expertise in creating data pipelines in the data platform.Â
Setting the Client Up for Success With Pilot Use Cases
In five short weeks, phData created automated, scalable pipelines for two pilot use cases within Snowflake.
For each use case, this included:
- Plan: Reviewing data sources to assess quality and the best way to ingest into Snowflake.
- Design: Architecting and designing the solution to ingest data. To maximize automation and minimize manual overhead, the team relied on Fivetran for data ingestion and dbt Cloud for data transformation.
- Validate: The phData team worked closely with the client’s business units to validate the ingested and transformed data with visualization tools, including Tableau, ThoughtSpot and Power BI. We also analyzed the performance of established queries within Snowflake to compare against benchmarks.
- Documentation: phData implemented and documented software engineering best practices, including those for Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery. We established Information Architecture recommendations for future use cases, including a detailed plan for implementing their new data platform across business units.
Take the next step
with phData.
Looking into proving out the value of Snowflake for your organization? Learn how phData can help solve your most challenging problems.Â
