Microsoft Fabric to delivering fast, real-time insights

About client

Our client is a prominent B2B FinTech enterprise company offering comprehensive financial market and global management services. They support businesses of all sizes, navigate complex financial operations like mergers and acquisitions, private equity, loan servicing, and other wealth management and asset protection services. 

Challenges

Playing an integral role in bolstering the financial backbone of businesses, our client faced two to three tough challenges regarding data management. 

One side is their data times trying to tame high volumes of data and share business reports every team and role required. On the other side are their business users from c-suite to user levels, requiring reports and dashboards for their day-to-day tasks. 

Here is what their data team went through.

Compliance: Compliance was an on-going problem for them. Running operations globally, they were required to be adept with up-to-date regulatory requirements and adhere to them without fail. But their data management challenges made it difficult, putting them at a risk of breaches and privacy compromises.  

No real-time analytics: Without having a data warehouse, they had to perform batch processing of data into their visualization platform, which took 10 to 13 hours approximately. This caused delayed report generation for business users, affecting internal processes and affecting data-driven decision making culture. 

Data inconsistency issues: Improper pipelines and batch processing not only overloaded their processing capabilities but caused duplication and consistency issues too. This resulted in skewed analytics that they couldn’t rely on. We identified that they had way too many data sources which weren’t properly integrated as a reason for this inconsistency.

Our solution

Upon assessing their situation, we decided that a unified data environment is what they need. We have built an enterprise data layer using Microsoft Fabric where all the data could remain within one environment. 

We set up data pipelines which will take care of data movement from the raw zone to the gold zone after necessary transformations. This real-time data movement will help them in the following ways. 

Quick, reliable insights: Data processing and ingestion no longer takes 12+ hours. Rather they receive near-real-time Power BI reports within an hour the data enters the system. 

All data in one place: They no longer need to deal with fragmented data sources as all of their data resides in one platform. The aggregated view of data and near-real-time data availability elevated their analytics standards, helping them nourish a new culture where they make decisions based on real-time data.

Conclusion

We have also migrated their past dashboards from the previous visualization platform to Power BI, so their entire reporting ecosystem will be within Microsoft. Now, the client is happy with all their analytics experiences maintained using one tool in the most fuss-free manner. The change significantly helped their company adopt a new culture where decisions are backed with fresh, accurate analytics.