At The 2025 Trustage Fintech Summit, Abigail Fowler shared how Abound Credit Union's partnership with Arkatechture has transformed the organization's data management, leading to significant time savings, improved data accuracy, and a shift towards viewing data as a valuable asset. The implementation of Arkalytics has enabled the organization to streamline reporting, prepare for core conversion, and move towards predictive modeling to achieve their 2026 strategic goals. This success is attributed to a strong data foundation, top-level engagement, and a cultural shift towards data-driven decision-making.
In 2019, Abound was facing significant data inaccuracies, manual reporting inefficiencies, and slow data access, highlighted by a $198 million mortgage portfolio error, prompting the need for a dedicated data strategy.
They knew it was time to make a change, so, they embarked on building out a data team, and looking for a partner.So in 2019, a single mistake over inflated our mortgage portfolio by 198,000,000 dollars. Now, don't worry. It never went anywhere. It never even left an email but it happened." - Abigail Fowler, Director of Data Analytics at Abound Credit Union.
Abound established an internal analytics team, adopted Tableau in 2020, and partnered with Arkatechture in 2022 for a data readiness assessment, which confirmed their readiness for a data lake investment.
We initially partnered with arkatechture in 2022 for a data readiness assessment. We just wanted somebody to come in and help tell us 'Are you ready for this big of an investment in moving into a data lake?' and turns out we were...And so we very quickly started a year long RFP process. And then determined again that Arkatechture was yet again the best partner for our current state and also for our future strategic role that we wanted to do inside of analytics." - Abigail Fowler
4000 Hours of Manual Work Eliminated
Branch statistics, things like that. That was taking a team member about an hour and a half to two hours every day to manually compile and send out to everybody with our integration with tableau and being able to move over to an automated format. We were able to get that down to 15 minutes. And so we were able to cut out from 17 to 20 percent of this individual's year that he was spending on just these two reports to less than three percent. - Abigail Fowler
With a solid data foundation from Arkatechture, the organization is now moving beyond hypothetical discussions to implement predictive modeling for member attrition, next-best product recommendations, and CD renewals, aligning with their 2026 strategic goals.
We'd love to be able to predict next best product for a member, or how many of our CDS are going to actually renew, or how many are going to lose, are we going to lose?...And all of that is because we now have that foundation with Arkatechture where we can make those hypotheticals an actual implementation strategy for us and align those with our 2026 goals. - Abigail Fowler