Customer Story

National Bank Accelerates Decision Making to Improve Branch Operations

Company Overview

Founded in 1943 by Otto Bremer, the company is headquartered in St. Paul, Minnesota and provides a comprehensive range of banking, mortgage, investment, wealth management, trust and insurance products and services throughout Minnesota, North Dakota and Wisconsin.

Problem

Bremer Bank monitored data from several areas of their business to measure branch performance and customer satisfaction.  With this information, their ultimate goal was to ensure they had competitive offerings, profitable branches, and the best possible customer service.  However, to glean these insights from their data in FIS, business analysts were spending a considerable amount of time manually combining data into Excel spreadsheets and SQL Tables to perform heavy calculations against their large datasets.

Bremer sought Analytics8’s help to develop a more streamlined and automated method to consolidate, analyze, and visualize their data to enable faster and more precise decision making.

Solution

We developed several Qlik Sense applications that allowed Bremer to optimize decision-making in the following areas:

  • Loss Prevention Services: Over 50 million transactions were loaded into this application so that end users can view a summary of transactions that occurred in the previous day. Transaction type is broken out into categories, including hot card, international, and pre-authorizations and declines, which gives the Loss Prevention team a faster, more detailed method to report on credit cards. They can also quickly discover correlations between cards that have been compromised.
  • Market Activity: This application pulls in millions of records and transactions from each branch and provides a comprehensive view of individual branch activity, customer demographics, and how frequently businesses are visiting various branches for deposits. This information helps Bremer determine what factors contribute to a profitable branch and if any locations need to be restructured or closed.
  • Relationship Profitability: We integrated three million rows of income and expense data to help Bremer understand which banking relationships are the most profitable. Users can drill-down into successful branch data to identify what leads to the highest profits.
  • Mortgage: This application tracks the mortgage application process and how the timing for each phase measures against the established SLA’s as well as against each Loan Processor’s peers. This helped Bremer identify which Mortgage processors needed additional mentoring or training to catch up to the processing times of their peers.
  • Treasury Management/Payments: Bremer now has a consolidated view of their transactional data from disparate banking systems which allows them to visualize the breakdown of in-branch transactions, remote deposits, ATM transactions, and electronic fund transfers.

Results

With the implementation of smart technology, consolidated data, and data-driven strategies, Bremer has experienced several positive process changes and results:

  • More timely decisions: Bremer can make faster decisions with less reliance on data modeling and manual report building. For example, they save several hours each month determining the closest branch location to a customer’s residence using quick distance calculations, instead of manually overlaying branch locations on a map.
  • Timely identification of under-performers: Bremer can now plot teller activity data in 30-minute increments which gives quick insight into the tellers who are not performing up to peer standards or to the industry average of 7 transactions per half-hour.
  • Less manual data manipulation: Bremer eliminated approximately 5 work days of manual data manipulation per month.
  • Visualizations that better communicate value of data: New data visualizations and dashboards allows users to more quickly recognize trends, correlations, and outliers in their large transactional dataset.
  • Moving towards a data driven culture: Once various groups in Bremer saw the benefits of this solution, there were many requests for access and to see more applications.  As user adoption grows, Bremer gains impressive potential for better decision making, increased productivity, and opportunities for business growth.
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