American Financial Institution Case Study

Cookie Notice

This site uses cookies for performance, analytics, personalization and advertising purposes.

For more information about how we use cookies please see our Cookie Policy.

Manage Consent Preferences

Essential/Strictly Necessary Cookies

Required

These cookies are essential in order to enable you to move around the website and use its features, such as accessing secure areas of the website.

Analytical/ Performance Cookies

These are analytics cookies that allow us to collect information about how visitors use a website, for instance which pages visitors go to most often, and if they get error messages from web pages. This helps us to improve the way the website works and allows us to test different ideas on the site.

Functional/ Preference Cookies

These cookies allow our website to properly function and in particular will allow you to use its more personal features.

Targeting/ Advertising Cookies

These cookies are used by third parties to build a profile of your interests and show you relevant adverts on other sites. You should check the relevant third party website for more information and how to opt out, as described below.

Seconds

for dashboard load times

Zero

data movement required

Region

Americas

Industry

Financial Services & Insurance

Environment

On-Premise

Solution

Enterprise

Employees

1000+

We have data in the warehouse, lake, lakehouse, and eventually the cloud. The beauty of Starburst is materializing a view across all those data sources. As we make changes on the back-end, we don’t have to worry about the migration or data movement, because everything is being stitched together with Starburst.

Anonymous, Head of Analytics

Seconds

for dashboard load times

Zero

data movement required

About

The leading financial institution, boasts a robust analytics and insights organization. With nearly 450 dedicated professionals, it centralizes analytics reporting and modeling functions and serves as the foundation of the bank’s data-driven decision-making.

The bank undertook a strategic transition to leverage the combined capabilities of ThoughtSpot and Starburst to solve for fragmented data sources and sluggish query performance. The alignment of ThoughtSpot and Starburst Enterprise has empowered the bank with efficient self-service analytics, reduced reliance on ad hoc dashboards, and significantly improved query performance, ultimately enabling more streamlined and impactful data-driven insights.

Challenge

The leading financial institution faced the following challenges prior to implementing Starburst Enterprise and ThoughtSpot. These included:

Ad hoc query overload: The analytics team contended with a staggering volume of over 1,200 ad hoc queries annually, diverting a significant portion, approximately 30-45%, of team resources away from higher-value tasks.
Resource-intensive BI solutions: Traditional BI platforms required extensive effort to design and manage, resulting in inefficiencies and delays in providing insights.
Limited accessibility for business users: The need for SQL proficiency restricted data accessibility for business users, hindering their ability to conduct self-service analytics.
Overwhelming number of reports: This team accumulated over 1,500 reports, many of which were redundant or outdated, illustrating a need for a more streamlined reporting approach.

Need for faster query responses: The bank recognized the critical importance of quicker query response times to facilitate safe self-service analytics. Existing systems, particularly with Teradata, fell short of performance expectations.

Solution

To address these challenges, the bank has integrated Starburst Enterprise and ThoughtSpot into their analytics environment. Starburst acts as the backbone, enhancing query performance and data access speed. Additionally, it provides an abstraction layer, enabling seamless data integration from disparate sources.

ThoughtSpot complements Starburst by providing an intuitive front-end experience for business users, allowing them to interact with data without the need for SQL expertise. This combination will empower users to generate insights independently, reducing the burden on the analytics team.

Results:

The implementation of Starburst and ThoughtSpot is set to provide several significant improvements at the bank:

Swift dashboard loading times: Previously, dashboards that took minutes to load now perform significantly faster. With Starburst, it is anticipated that these dashboards will load in five seconds or less, enabling users to access critical insights swiftly.
Streamlined Analytics Workflow: The implementation of Starburst is expected to reduce the time and resources spent on ad-hoc analytics by a significant margin. Preliminary estimates suggest that this reduction could be as high as 30-40% through enabling self-service analytics. This will allow the analytics team to focus on higher-value tasks.
Empowered business users: ThoughtSpot’s user-friendly interface empowers business users to generate ad-hoc queries and access insights independently, reducing reliance on the analytics team.
Future-proofing business operations: With Starburst, this financial institution can establish a robust data foundation that’s adaptable to evolving technology landscapes. This future-proofs the business, guaranteeing adaptability to evolving technology landscapes and safeguarding against potential disruptions once the bank migrates to the cloud.

In conclusion, the strategic integration of Starburst and ThoughtSpot has enhanced this bank’s analytics capabilities, driving efficiency and empowering business users with timely, actionable insights, all while ensuring the business remains agile and prepared for future advancements in its data environment.