Data Analytics Innovation with Abound Credit Union

Abound Credit Union's Data Journey

Established in 1950, Abound Credit Union is Kentucky's largest credit union. Abound launched their data analytics program in the spring of 2020, and implemented Tableau the following fall. They are in the process of preparing for a core conversion in 2025 from Fiserv DataSafe to Symitar.

Here's the inside scoop on how their team established their foundation for analytics through people, processes, infrastructure, and especially culture. It's not a one-size-fits-all approach.

Every organization is going to be unique, and your approach to analytics could be, or might have been, a different journey. This is what Abound Credit Union has done, what they're doing now, where they're going, and some tips for you along the way.

It All Starts With Team

It all starts with the team. We're going to start from the ground up here. While you may start with one person and grow from there, the goal is to get that well-balanced team that is structured with skill sets and experience to accomplish what you need today, while also ensuring long-term growth. Kind of like a three-legged stool, we have found that the most well-balanced team for us at this point in time consists of three players: our data analyst, our data visualist, and our data scientist." - Abigail McGraw, Data Analytics Manager at Abound Credit Union

• The Data Visualist: Helps you cross that bridge from Excel and data tables that might have been laborious for your end users to gain insights from into that visual business intelligence reporting.
• The Data Analyst: Takes that next step and looks beyond the visual structure to help paint a picture and new perspectives, bringing in new areas of comparison, or more intuitive interpretations of what the visual conveys.
• The Data Scientist: Helps you keep your eyes on the future and drive your team away from reactive towards proactive thinking through enabling predictive capabilities.

The goal is to get a well-structured and well-balanced team. You need a team that is passionate about what they’re doing. If you don’t have the team and the culture in place when embarking on your data journey, odds are that a data lake could potentially fall flat.

You need that data engagement in order to make a data lake project successful. Otherwise, you’ll get to the end of it, and the only people who will truly care about it as much as you are those involved with the implementation."

This is why it's so crucial to get your team on board and build a strong data culture.

Building Data Culture at Your Company

Company-wide data culture is a subtle essential that can sometimes be undervalued. It's important to foster curiosity and understanding of the value that data brings to the credit union.

When I started, the biggest challenge was that we didn’t have a clear path or plan for how to use our data effectively. We had data everywhere, but no central location or strategy for using it. We had different people in different departments creating their own reports, with no consistency or central oversight."

Building Trust in Your Data

After centralizing their data and reporting, building their single source of truth,  and building their data analytics team, their next challenge was building trust with the rest of the organization - a fundamental piece of adoption and building data culture. 

We had to show that the analytics team could provide valuable insights and help the rest of the organization make better decisions. This meant working closely with other departments, understanding their needs, and delivering quick wins to build that trust."

Data Literacy for All

The Abound team also focused on increasing data literacy across the organization. They provided training and resources to help people understand how to use data effectively. They created dashboards that were easy to use and understand, with walkthrough videos and user guides to make sure everyone could get the most out of the data. These were key elements to building a culture of people who were on board with data analytics across the credit union. In addition, they worked to create a culture of continuous improvement.

We encouraged people to constantly reevaluate their reports and metrics to make sure they were still relevant and useful. We pushed people to question the status quo and look for ways to improve. Now, a few years later, we have a strong data culture at Abound Credit Union. We have centralized data, a trusted analytics team, and a culture of continuous improvement. We’re using data to drive better decisions and deliver better results for our members.

What They're Doing Now: Abound's Daily Loans Dashboard

Before: 

This used to be an Excel spreadsheet that took an hour and a half to two hours to do every morning just to create the data source that fed into the old Excel version. This included combining over 7 different pre-canned reports, a manual lookup of every single visa's insurance code in one system, and then doing another manual lookup of every visa's originating branch in another system. Inevitably there were many manual errors.

Today:

This report takes 5-10 minutes every morning. This report isn’t fully automated yet, but it's as close as the Abound team could get for now as they transition to fully automated reports with Arkalytics. With the creation of this report, they cut back on thousands of hours of manual work, plus it's way easier to read. You can see where you are relative to your monthly goals rather than running different calculations in Excel to get there. 

Moving Forward with Continuous Improvement

The idea that all the metrics and reporting that we could possibly need are already in place is absolutely false. We let ourselves get stuck in that comfort zone when we don’t reevaluate."

The Abound Credit Union team recognizes that the dashboards they are currently using are accomplishing their goal right now, but environments change, and we live in a world where that rate of change is constantly increasing. That change is impacting economic factors that impact members, and if membership is experiencing changes, reporting should as well.

We need to make sure that we’re evolving with and not against the grain. One of my favorite phrases, and I know we have all heard this before, is 'just because it’s always been done, doesn’t mean it needs to be.' How many hours are being spent every day, week, month on something that is potentially obsolete?"

Abound Credit Union is on its way to creating a hub for data with Arkalytics. They want one department across the organization that centralizes reporting so that they don’t have pockets of individuals creating different reports with different data definitions across departments. They need centralized data and centralized reporting using agreed-upon data governance standards. 

In this pursuit, we must adopt that mindset of reevaluation as a good thing so that we can stay on top of the game. Because if we fall behind, that climb to get back up is going to be so much harder on our technology team and on our organization."

To learn more, and hear about how Abound is preparing for a core conversion, check out the full webinar recording