As a result of their business model, Bankers’ Bank manages massive amounts of disparate data from various sources (structured and unstructured), including:
- Data from processing transactions for hundreds of financial institutions across the Midwest
- Public data generated by clients, including line of business and operations data
The vast amounts of data they have collected and stored over time, coupled with the copious amounts of data produced in the financial industry, meant that Bankers’ Bank faced a tremendous opportunity to reimagine the potential data solutions around combining historically siloed datasets.
The Solution: Aligning People, Process, and Technology
People: The catalyst for change at Bankers’ Bank was finding the most strategic and direct path forward for the data initiative, given that the data team was a diverse mix of technical experts, an administrator, and citizen data scientists, all of whom collaborated with the business units to determine an area of focus through a Minimal Viable Product (MVP). To effectively bridge the gap between where these collective stakeholders were in that current stage and actually becoming data driven, the solution not only had to work well given the diversity of each user profile, but it had to empower them via enterprise-grade tooling and sustainable, collaborative processes.
Process: Ultimately born out of that MVP, Bankers’ Bank aimed to determine which data projects to prioritize, with a laser focus on gaining executive buy-in for the ones that would spark initial value and could later be replicated and expanded across the business. A critical part of that process is tooling, and Bankers’ Bank worked closely with Excelion Partners to find Dataiku. Excelion Partners is a data science and analytics consulting organization that leverages Dataiku for its end-to-end analytical capabilities and collaboration-driven features.

Barbara Gross, SVP and CIO at Bankers’ Bank, said that Excelion was pivotal in their process, acting as their guide, listening to them, learning about their business, and challenging them — helping them use information better and improve on how they understand people’s consumption of data. For Bankers’ Bank, Excelion suggested an industry-standard agile methodology approach called CRISP-DM which includes business understanding, data sources and pipeline, prep and modeling, and findings.
Technology: While not a magic bullet, the technology, in this instance, was the glue that brought the people and processes together. Most critically, Bankers’ Bank uses Dataiku for reporting and dashboards that had previously been compiled in Excel. Given that Bankers’ Bank’s Board of Directors uses this data for critical business decisions and financial reporting, Dataiku gives them the visibility and governance needed to ensure that the data is correct, reliable, and repeatable.
Upon using Dataiku, Bankers’ Bank has been able to:
- Help team members clearly see the data journey from raw data to business insights through visualizations in Dataiku (giving people a better sense of where data is cleaned up, combined, and used)
- Avoid reliance on Excel experts, making data analysis more attainable for people that might not have Excel-specific technical skills or SQL experience
- Utilize a centralized data source so everyone has visibility into how specific reports are made and work can easily be duplicated, which eliminates not only double work but the need to rely on one single person for valuable reporting