Consumer Lending Pioneer Saves 34 Days of Labor by Moving to the Cloud

Customer Profile

This lending institution, a pioneer in the alternative banking industry, had quickly grown to serve over 1.5 million customers. The bank's retail operation was entirely virtual, serving customers exclusively via web, email, and phone. Data from millions of customer transactions flowed through these channels into a meticulously kept, state-of-the-art IT infrastructure, to be analyzed by specialists across five departments.

Challenges

The tech-savvy analysts used a basic BI tool that required manual queries. This meant two people in each department had to spend two days a week creating reports. What's more, all the queries caused the system to crash during peak times. Even when it was up, it didn't work the same for every operating system or browser. Only a few people knew how to maintain the system, and because they had many other duties, bugs tended to stay until the once-a-year patch.

It was clear the company needed a standard reporting tool, but with such a diverse array of devices in use and an IT team already stretched thin, crafting a solution on premises seemed a daunting prospect.

Solution

In fact, bank staff calculated, it cost the equivalent of 34 days of one employee's time just to maintain their old BI system. This included keeping current on patches, troubleshooting environment issues, figuring out customizations, and enduring downtime from learning mistakes.

There had to be a better way. And in this case, that way was MicroStrategy Cloud.

Within two months of subscribing to MicroStrategy Cloud, bank analysts were working with a new BI system that was configured, customized, and fully tested for capability and performance. One project was up and running, with two others underway. Half the data warehouse was already in the cloud, with the rest to follow soon after.

The MicroStrategy Difference

Within two months of subscribing to MicroStrategy Cloud, our customer realized the following benefits:

• Moving to the cloud, where MicroStrategy engineers could resolve nearly every issue within a day, freed bank professionals for more valuable work.
• The cloud platform also reduced capital risk, since it was no longer necessary to pay for more BI computing than what was needed in a given month.
• Although the bank's data warehouse was now physically housed in a secure MicroStrategy facility many miles away, users often got faster responses than they did when the data was local.

All this was accomplished in less time than it once took to create a single BI dashboard in-house.

Our commitment to confidentiality prevents us from disclosing the identity of this customer.