MoneySQ makes timely and effective decisions in fast-paced FinTech industry
67% time savings in implementation
Sped up decision-making from weekly to daily basis
Effective team communication with data
MoneySQ is a young FinTech company based in Hong Kong. They run an online lending platform which utilizes crowdfunding to match savvy investors with credit-worthy borrowers. Chief Data Officer Jacob Wai introduced Tableau to help business users distill better insights from numbers and make data-driven decisions.
Since implementation, Tableau has helped MoneySQ maximize time and money with real-time data reporting and decision-making, and improved communication and collaboration between different teams through rich data visualizations.
As it took time to collect and report data manually, it would take up to a week to implement strategy changes. But now that we’ve got Tableau, people are making decisions on a day-to-day basis.
Real-time reporting and decision-making
Before Tableau, MoneySQ employees tracked their business targets manually, entering duplicated versions of data into multiple platforms like Excel and other online tools. The process of collecting relevant data and submitting reports to management took at least two days, which meant that the company could only make decisions and roll out strategy changes on a weekly basis. Such delays are a huge liability in a fast-paced and ever-changing financial landscape.
“But now that we’ve got Tableau, people are making decisions on a day-to-day basis,” shared Jacob. “We have become much more versatile in our product offerings to our customers.”
Real-time insights are also critical for effective marketing campaigns. With Tableau, the marketing team can measure the success of TV commercials, as well as the sales conversion rate. Tableau’s drill-down capabilities allow them to analyze the results across different filters and categories, such as television channels, time slots and spend. In many ways, data analytics has helped MoneySQ optimize their marketing efforts to maximize returns on investment.
Before there was Tableau, a lot of the analysis would have to be done in teams and one team wouldn’t understand the work of the other.
Effective team communication with data
As a financial services company, MoneySQ deals with a lot of numerical data such as credit ratings and credit shifts. “That’s all fine if you are a data scientist or a statistician,” said Jacob. Unlike the credit team, sales and marketing people find it difficult to decipher the significance behind the numbers.
This is where Tableau facilitated and fostered collaboration across different teams – by bringing data to life through colorful and diverse visualizations ranging from heat maps to bubble charts and bullet graphs.
“So instead of talking in numbers, our sales and marketing teams can now understand the credit team because [the data] is in visual form with different colors and sizes.”
For example, the different color and size segments on a bubble chart can help the marketing team derive insights from what used to be pure numbers and statistics, helping them identify critical target segments easily.
By transforming inaccessible numbers into an intuitive and appealing visual form, Tableau helped MoneySQ to bridge the gap between different teams dealing with work of completely different natures.
With the help of system-integrated partners from Tableau we were able to implement the whole system in a really short time frame within three months.
Seamless implementation and data blending
With the help of system-integrated partners from Tableau, MoneySQ implemented the whole system within three months, which is a very short time frame in the Hong Kong market according to Jacob.
“For a project size like MoneySQ, it takes around 6 to 9 months. So this is a real victory and a real success for us,” he said.
In fact, Jacob shared that he chose Tableau over other competing products because of its powerful data blending capabilities. Instead of the time-consuming traditional methods of data massaging and data transformation, Tableau is able to integrate effortlessly with MoneySQ’s existing databases and sources.
What impressed the Chief Data Officer the most was Tableau’s compatibility with less mainstream data sources such as Firebird, one of MoneySQ’s key platforms.
“That’s the strength of Tableau. As well as tying in with our legacy products and data sources, it can also accommodate our future strategic products such as Hadoop and MapR, allowing us to implement a long-term data strategy.”
As for MoneySQ’s future plans with Tableau, Jacob hopes that every single user in the company will eventually be able to use Tableau and do self-service analytics for their respective work scopes. With an analytics leader currently in every team ranging from finance to marketing and sales, MoneySQ will continue building a data-driven company culture with Tableau.