27 Feb Client Story: Supporting Digital Transformation for a Major Financial Services Provider
Client Story:
Supporting Digital Transformation for a Major Financial Services Provider
THE CHALLENGE
In an extremely competitive market, our client, a financial service provider, was looking to transform it’s service delivery model through a digital transformation program, aiming to set a new industry standard in customer experience.
It was also looking to expand into other markets globally, leveraging a functionally rich self-service environment, streamlined business processes, reduced operational complexities and underpinned by a data driven approach.
OUR BRIEF
With the Digital Transformation initiative launched, the InfoCentric team was engaged to design and build the Operational Data Store (ODS) to support a market-leading customer digital experience by integrating data from various transactional source systems. The goal was to create a centralised repository that would streamline data access and management, enabling real-time or near-real-time capabilities to enhance user experience. The InfoCentric data team would play a key role in collaborating closely with business SMEs, the integration layers, and digital teams to deliver a highly effective data framework.
OUR APPROACH
Leveraging our proven Data Modernisation implementation methodology and framework, the InfoCentric approach focused on 6 core areas:
- Business and Data Analysis: Our approach involved a deep understanding of the business requirements across diverse business units, enabling us to tailor the ODS solution to meet complex needs and challenges. We dedicated time to gaining in-depth insights into business processes, which allowed us to identify key areas for optimisation.
- Data Integration and Consolidation: The ODS was designed to consolidate data from various systems into a unified platform, eliminating data silos, and ensuring seamless access to accurate information.
- Modernising Data Architecture: The goal was to leverage the latest cloud based data platform services, enabling flexible integration with the newly developed digital application.
- Real-Time Data Processing: The ODS was designed to leverage modern data services to enable near-real-time data processing which would support overall responsiveness and self-service capabilities.
- Data Standardisation and Quality Assurance: Ensuring data consistency, accuracy and reliability was a top design priority. Our team implemented robust cleansing, de-duplication and effort resolution processes.
- Scalability and Flexibility: The solution was designed to be secure, scalable and robust, accommodating high traffic volumes from customers in multiple regions.
KEY OUTCOMES
The team successfully delivered the Operational Data Store (ODS) as a key stream of the digital transformation, maintaining an exceptional standard of excellence throughout the entire project lifecycle.
This success was driven by seamless collaboration across multiple cross-functional teams. We worked closely with business stakeholders, subject matter experts (SMEs), and technical teams to ensure the solution aligned with business objectives.
Our deep understanding of business needs, combined with our focus on performance optimisation, was key to delivering a solution that not only met but exceeded expectations. The result was a highly efficient, scalable, and accurate system that enhanced overall business performance, contributing significantly to the program’s success.
Some of the key technical achievements included:
Data Integration:
- Successfully integrated data from 5 complex legacy systems into the ODS.
- Delivered high-quality, accurate data by performing comprehensive transformation and cleansing processes, eliminating redundancies and resolving inconsistencies across systems, resulting in a unified and reliable data set.
- Established efficient processes that load data into the ODS with minimal disruption to daily operations, ensuring timely updates and availability of data without causing downtime or service interruptions.
Real-Time Data Processing and Retrieval:
- Enabled near real-time data processing, improving agility and responsiveness for digital applications. Achieved low-latency data fetching, with sub second query responses enhancing performance and user experience.
Data Modelling and Schema Design:
- Delivered a scalable data model to support diverse data types and future application needs. For example, As the business expanded with the introduction of a new digital application targeting a new customer base, the ODS was adaptable and able to accommodate additional data sources and technological needs easily.
Performance Optimisation:
- Ensured the ODS efficiently handles large data volumes and high query loads from digital applications, preventing performance degradation even during peak usage periods. Optimised data retrieval processes to minimise query response times, delivering a smooth, fast, and seamless user experience for both internal users and external digital applications that depend on the ODS for real-time data access. This was done by rigorous performance testing and continuous optimisation throughout the lifecycle of the project.
These outcomes provided the client with a robust, scalable, and efficient ODS, optimising operations, enhancing user experience, and supporting the ongoing evolution of next generation market leading digital applications.