The Decision Maker

This week’s BIGcast brings in OnApproach’s CEO, Paul Ablack, to talk with John Best about his vision for the credit union industry. The second episode of the Data Lake BIGcast Series, Data Lake: What It Takes, discusses how the creation of an industry-standard data lake could completely revolutionize the credit union industry. Paul goes into depth on the capabilities of a data lake and how this transformation is not only beneficial for credit unions, but the entire community.

Laying the Groundwork for the Future

OnApproach is a credit union service organization (CUSO) that is focused on collaborative analytics for the credit union industry. OnApproach provides credit unions with a middleware solution for efficiently organizing and maximizing the full potential of that data. Paul goes on to explain:

Data is extremely valuable for all the initiatives underway. The big challenge for credit unions is the integration of that data and putting it to the correct use. Our mission is to bring all that data into one place and make it easily accessible for not just credit unions, but the industry as a whole. We call this the CU App Store, where app developers and vendors can come in and create an app that credit unions can use to perform analysis (i.e. models of attrition, outreach, and predictive analytics).

Tips to Secure Your Data Lake is the first of four episodes for the Data Lake BIGcast Series. John Best, the CEO of Best Innovation Group, brings in Rojin Nair, General Manager of Fintech Solutions at Celero to discuss data lakes and how a collaborative credit union data lake could revolutionize the industry. Celero is a well-established Canadian fintech company that provides a wide variety of services to the banking industry. By managing financial transaction processing and offering leading technology solutions, they successfully maintain over 80 credit union banking systems.

Ask executives at the money center banks how they plan to win, against both fintechs and smaller institutions like credit unions, and they smirk as they say two words, big data.

Big data is today’s magic.  How does Amazon knows what book you want to read next, or what music you want to buy, or when you are about to run out of cat treats? Those are simple examples but the answer is big data. Amazon crunches a lot of data, in a blink of an eye, and it knows what you want, maybe before you know.

The race now is on inside financial institutions to crunch lots of data and to achieve similar predictive intimacy about their customers and members. 

In the webinar, "Fueling a Bright Future for Credit Union Analytics", Austin Wentzlaff, VP Business Development, OnApproach, presents the challenges and opportunities for credit unions regarding topics including data analytics, digital transformation, and collaboration. 

Credit unions are facing several unique challenges. As an industry, credit unions have fallen behind competing fintech startups and major retail banks. It is vital for financial institutions to understand the problems they are facing and how they are possible to overcome. In 2018, the credit union industry must work together to push past these challenges and remain relevant in the age of digital transformation.

In two previous OnApproach blogs, the concept of a data lake was defined and differentiated from a traditional data warehouse. Yet, a key point was a data lake and a data warehouse are not mutually exclusive. In fact, a structured data warehouse could be a subset of an overall data lake architecture.

Simply stated, a data lake is an effective way to store and access very large quantities of data.

What does this mean for credit union decision makers?

In my previous blog, “What is a Data Lake? Part 1”, I discussed how to define a data lake, and how it differs from a data warehouse. To briefly recap, a data lake is a massive data repository for raw data in its native format. To better understand the idea, let’s dive a bit deeper and get to know the advantages and disadvantages surrounding data lakes.

To start, there are a number of advantages data lakes serve for financial institutions:

Financial institutions all over are working to build effective data strategies and improve decision-making. With so many new technologies and innovations out there, it can get very difficult to keep up with the industry and even keep straight the buzzwords we hear throughout the day. In this piece, let’s dive in to better understand what makes a data lake.