by Hannah Barrett, on May 6, 2025
No More Limits: How Interra Credit Union Gained Trustworthy, Actionable Data with Arkalytics
Days after going live with Arkalytics, a Vice President of Lending got his hands on his first dashboard. He flew out of his office to tell his co-worker Todd Woods, SVP of Technology...
"...This dashboard gives me more than I ever had before!"
He knew they were only just scraping the tip of the iceberg when it came to the insights hiding within their data. Todd remarked that his colleague doesn't say things like that flippantly. This experience got the executive leadership team bought in, on board, and ready to become data-driven.
I know he and his team will be key drivers of asking questions in different ways, trying to see what we can leverage in ways we have not been able to before. That lets me know A. we picked the right partner, and B. we have the right plan." - Todd Woods
As the #2 agricultural credit union lender in the nation, Interra Credit Union is committed to supporting its community. To connect farmers with the capital they need to run a successful business, they first needed access to clean and conformed data to support their members.
Finding a New Data Analytics Partner
When Interra Credit Union began their search for a new data analytics solution, their existing data warehouse was rigidly structured, forcing them to conform to restrictive templates that limited their flexibility and insights. What drew Todd to Arkatechture was the flexibility in how they unify data from different systems and make it easy to use.
I don't want to be handcuffed. I get that that structured part helps a lot, but I also want the flexibility of having all of that data at our fingertips because at the end of the day what we were getting hit with was that it always seemed to be that the report we were being asked for or the data we were being asked for - we didn't have the data for it."
- Todd Woods, SVP of Technology at Interra Credit Union
The Interra CU team ended up having to go back to legacy ways of reporting, which defeated the purpose of having a data warehouse to begin with. With the way that Arkatechture's Snowflake data lake and warehouse is structured, the Interra CU team is not only able to easily access the data, but also cleanse it for reliable insights they can trust.
I remember very early on, maybe even the first phone call, we started with talking about the quality of data. We were pleasantly surprised by talking about data quality so early in the conversation...through the first iteration of turning on some data quality rules, and having those rules already written and turning them on and getting instantaneous insights...it's going to be a game changer."
-Todd Woods
Building Trust in Your Data and Team
I get a lot of appreciation from my peers when I talk about wanting them to have trust in the data...they know that we're going on the right track." -Todd Woods
Building trust is important when it comes to having reliable data and getting stakeholders on board with a large data transformation project. If you're unable to deliver a report because the data is inaccurate or inaccessible - that breaks trust. Building trust at the senior leadership table hinges on the way you communicate your narrative to cultivate a data-driven culture such as:
- Explaining technical initiatives and how they translate into real-world, non-technical impacts.
- Storytelling from the ground up while maintaining a high-level perspective, ultimately demonstrating how the new tool empowers users to ask and answer complex questions they may have never considered.
...Sometimes its not even about answering harder questions, it's to get them to be able to ask questions that they never thought they wanted to ask before, and that just feeds off each other. You get someone thinking about something in a different way - that leads to the second, third, fourth, very different question they may never have thought of before." - Todd Woods
If someone is solely focused on delivering a specific report, they may overlook the deeper questions that arise from curiosity. Gaining the ability to explore data more thoroughly—through daily imports—can unlock new insights they might not have considered.
Are you ready for organized data you can trust?
