Modernizing Data Stack ?
Prukalpa ?
Co-Founder at Atlan –?Home for Data Teams | Forbes30 & Fortune40 lists | TED Speaker
Austin Capital Bank, a fast-growing community bank, sought to modernize its data stack to support its evolution into a product-centric and digital-first bank. In just 16 months, the bank has adopted?Snowflake,?dbt,?Fivetran,?Thoughtspot, and?Atlan?as its Active Metadata Management solution of choice.
The bank is now able to launch new products at unprecedented speed and effectiveness, with Atlan supporting customer data querying for a new product with mere hours of implementation effort.
In this edition of the newsletter, read highlights from our conversation with Ian Bass, Head of Data & Analytics at Austin Capital Bank on how they modernized their data stack in just 16 months to support their first-in-market products and services.
? Spotlight:?A Modern Data Stack, Built in Just 16 Months
A member of the Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing private companies for seven consecutive years, Austin Capital Bank is a leader in community banking, using technology and data to fuel its nationwide growth.
“We started off several years ago with goals just like any other community bank, serving the Austin community,” shared Ian Bass, Head of Data & Analytics for Austin Capital Bank. “After a few years of being the sponsor bank for a FinTech offering, our founders decided we could build this kind of thing ourselves. So we started building our own digital banking products division, which is where Credit Strong was born.”
Credit Strong represented a new frontier for Austin Capital Bank, a fully digital offering of loans and lines of credit, offered to consumers with no credit history or poor credit to help them improve their scores without the common risk of predatory lending or credit cards with astronomical interest rates.
Transforming from a community bank, offering traditional products like checking and savings accounts with a brick-and-mortar location and online portals, into a digital-first bank with a national customer footprint, was no trivial task. Not only would it demand groundbreaking products and modern user experiences, but also the best and brightest minds in Data & Analytics, with the technology to help them launch and iterate at unprecedented speed.
Austin Capital Bank’s transactional data resided in AWS and PostgresSQL databases, and were not well-connected, making something as simple as querying across databases difficult to impossible. To meet the significant demands of a new digital products model, Ian and his team were tasked with a true ground-up build of a modern data stack.
“What I really wanted to build was a NextGen platform that I could use to democratize access to data and analytics,” Ian shared. “So the first step was to virtualize this into an environment where none of those barriers would exist. That was Snowflake.”
Moving from implementing Snowflake, Ian’s team sought a solution to ingest data without the need for significant data engineering resources, choosing Fivetran and launching in just one month as they began to integrate into their core technology and build models. Already existing at the bank were Tableau and PowerBI, serving as a temporary visualization and analysis layer.
Just 16 months later, Austin Capital Bank and Credit Strong would sit atop a thoroughly modern data stack, built to support digital financial products that required far more flexibility than traditional banking systems and architected to run lean.
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"When I came in, none of this existed. And today we have about six different SaaS products that comprise our data stack. We have ThoughtSpot, we use Snowflake, we use Reverse ETL tools. We have a lot of things in place that we can virtualize and handle with a two or three-person team, as opposed to needing a big engineering team.?We’re paying for these tools, but it’s offsetting costs in that we don’t need to hire teams to do this. We can run really lean, and we can pivot very quickly." – Ian Bass, Head of Data & Analytics
But while tool after tool was successfully implemented, Ian and his team were spending significant effort responding to requests for data and had yet to find a way to offer this data in a self-service manner while remaining compliant. Active Metadata Management would prove to be the missing piece.
As we thought about data governance more and more, it became clear I wanted a tool to handle that. You really need an interface built on top of Snowflake so that you can easily see who has access to what.?And that’s where Atlan came into the picture.?I was really taken with the whole concept of DataOps and what that meant, and what we’re driving toward is every team being a data team.?– Ian Bass, Head of Data & Analytics
With the right Active Metadata Management platform, Austin Capital Bank could finally offer self-service to its data consumers without sacrificing strong access and masking policies.
“Atlan became a necessity. That’s how we control access in an easily repeatable fashion,” Ian explained. “And then the fact that we have data lineage on top of it, and the ability to organize all of our information and classifications, and add glossary terms linked to that data? That’s all icing on the cake for us.”
Where data consumers once had to approach Ian and his team for data requests, his team now uses Atlan to build queries that enable their colleagues in teams like Operations to run reports on demand. Moreover, with masking policies in place, this data is not only available via self-service, but is governed in a manner where only authorized users can access it.
With the right data technology, activated and accessible using Atlan, Austin Capital Bank is in a stronger position to launch new products and services, and evolve its business model.
The road ahead for Austin Capital Bank remains ambitious, with a project to build a 360-degree view of their customers, inclusive of web activity. Also crucial to support a growing number of deposit-based products will be new metrics and KPIs, supported by Ian’s team and accessible through Atlan.
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