- Resolved nearly 40,000 data errors with Tableau
- Achieved 80%+ Tableau adoption across all credit union staff
- Saved ~15 hours per week with automated reporting
St. Mary’s Bank, the first credit union in the United States, has supported the financial needs of individuals, families, and businesses for more than 100 years with its banking, lending, and long-range planning services. Five years ago, disparate systems made it difficult to get a holistic view of their data and technology that needed updating. This made it challenging to engage and report to more staff without added cost and to track the accuracy of loan applications and financial transactions for its 100,000+ members. They embarked on a journey - first, to upgrade technology and build a data warehouse to store all data in one place. With an emphasis on becoming a more data-driven company, they began replacing manual reports with Tableau dashboards. After successfully moving from on-premise to the cloud with Amazon Web Services (AWS), St. Mary’s Bank scaled Tableau as its enterprise analytics solution. Today, with Tableau’s native connection to AWS and data sources like Snowflake, St. Mary’s Bank performs fast, reliable, and cost-effective analysis on customer assets totaling more than $1 billion.
We have greatly expanded our Tableau usage. In an organization that's approximately 250 people, and an industry that is not known for being tech-focused… the fact that we have over 160 Tableau users is something we love to talk about.
Melissa PomeroyDirector of Business Analytics and Project Management, St. Mary's Bank
Easier data access improves branch operations and customer service
Today, nearly 70% of staff use Tableau to gather insights on branch operations and make data-driven decisions that improve customer service, asset management, and operations performance. With all data consolidated in AWS, the Business Analytics and Project Management team, with the help of Arkatechture, also introduced a rules engine on top of AWS, which expedited data cleansing and helped maintain regulatory compliance. Data quality is tracked in Tableau for business teams to view on-demand each morning, and so far, nearly 40,000 data errors have been resolved with a weekly savings of 10 to 20 hours.
St. Mary’s also monitors volunteerism, a strategic company goal, with Tableau as well. The dashboard tracks monthly volunteer hours for all employees and the monetary value of those hours so leadership can recognize individual, department, and collective company accomplishments that support its culture of giving.
“When I look at what our teams are doing within each different department, and I look at the prevalent role data plays in each operational production environment, it makes me proud of the data culture we’ve developed at St. Mary’s Bank,” shared Melissa Pomeroy, Director of Business Analytics and Project Management.
Nurturing data culture with community activities
As Tableau adoption grew within St. Mary’s Bank, the business analytics team opened up what they call “Tableau office hours.” Every six weeks, employees can stop by to ask questions or to learn something new from their peers.
The team is also investing in training other employees on how to access available dashboards or access data to build their own. They also add some fun to the mix by creating games for employees to test their Tableau knowledge.
“We ask for a representative from each business area and we put a business question up on the board,” shared Melissa. “We give them ten minutes to go into a dashboard or workbook and whoever can come up with the answer wins a prize. It has really helped people get excited and understand that data can be fun.”