Mahindra Finance democratizes data to help every employee perform at their best
30% faster time to insight as data is available to be consumed right away
3,000 employees trained and using Tableau to make data-driven decisions
Increased productivity which helps Mahindra Finance reduce costs and increase growth
Mahindra Finance is one of the largest Non-Banking Financial Companies in India and part of the wider Mahindra Group, a $19.4 billion federation of companies with operations in 100 countries. Together, they share a philosophy of 'Rise For Good' and are focused on transforming rural lives and driving positive change in the communities.
Mahindra Finance delivers on this mission by providing customers with a range of financial services. These include automotive loans, personal loans, consumer durables financing, insurance broking, mutual funds, and home loans.
In 2017, Mahindra Finance turned to Tableau and began a data journey to drive its business' continued growth while increasing productivity and repayment efficiency. The business has since established a strong data culture that helps every employee achieve better results.
Tableau has helped us to bring a data-first culture into our business. Everyone has access to data, and they review dashboards daily to understand and drive performance.
Democratizing data for every employee
In the past, extraction of data from systems and dashboards for senior management were functions centralised under IT. However, with data becoming more important for decision making, the business wanted a solution that would democratize data and make it accessible to everyone. It chose Tableau because of positive testimonials from other large banks and because it came with a number of features suited to its needs. These included integration with Python and the scalability needed to support thousands of users at once.
Mahindra Finance established a Tableau Centre of Excellence early on and hired a team of business intelligence (BI) experts, including several Tableau admins and testers. They established a private cloud infrastructure and created a data mart with all of the information they needed for dashboards to get started. As a financial services company, Mahindra Finance follows strict guidelines in relation to data handling and privacy, so it also set up a governance framework to prevent unauthorized data access.
The next phase of adoption included training. Mahindra Finance began with training for its BI experts and has subsequently provided training on data-based decision making for a total of 3,000 employees. This includes senior and middle management, branch managers, field executives, and those who work in departments like human resources and marketing.
The CRG team worked in collaboration with the Tableau team to achieve sustainable, scalable Tableau Analytics at Mahindra Finance. They helped adopt the right Data Strategy and create Data Marts and functional Dashboards that helped the management in taking data driven decisions and track business growth.
Magnifying business intelligence
According to Mr. Agarwal, Tableau has put a magnifying glass on the business, allowing management to examine all aspects of performance. For example, they can view the business' entire portfolio on a monthly and quarterly basis and drill down to look at descriptive parameters such as location or interest rate. They can also look at predictive parameters such as the probability of default.
Tableau helps branch managers and field executives understand performance at a local level. They can track how many new loans are secured each day and how many more they need to reach the national average. They can also see which loans are due or past due for repayment. Equated monthly installments (EMIs) are paid in cash, so once executives identify which loans are due, they can use Tableau to plot those customers on a map and plan their daily route.
Non performing assets (NPAs) is another key datapoint tracked by Mahindra Finance, and with Tableau, it can monitor this on a more granular level. "We have always tracked NPAs, but now we can spot trends and investigate issues at a branch level. If we see that someone is routinely bringing in non performing contracts, for example, we can find out why and support them to bring in better business," said Mr. Agarwal. "This helps us to control NPAs better and manage our profitability."
A lot of our business parameters have been changing, and tracking all of that manually would have been impossible, but Tableau has made it easy and is now helping us plan as business activities come back.
Continuing the data journey
Mahindra Finance is building on its data culture with a mission to bring all 16,000 of its employees onto Tableau. It is currently creating dashboards for business functions like HR, marketing, accounting, and legal. These include a new dashboard for marketing which helps them to identify regions for potential growth.
Mr. Agarwal shared that the business is also augmenting its data with external data points. By looking at data from the Regional Transport Office, for example, Mahindra Finance could see how many cars have been sold and plan its sales targets accordingly.
Predictive analytics is another important focus for the business. It is already using predictive analytics to assess new loans' risk and wants to expand this to new use cases
"I believe data analytics will get a lot more predictive. I don't want to just look at how we performed last quarter. I want to know how much we will grow and how productive we will be in the future," Mr. Agarwal concludes.
