Background

This customer is a multinational banking and financial services company. It is the second largest bank in the U.S. in deposits, home mortgage servicing, and debit cards.  

Use Case

With large volumes of data entering the servicing acquisition workflow, the bank faced many challenges. Data frequently came from multiple sources throughout the process life cycle and needed to be consolidated and reconciled. Data transformation, done in Access databases, required significant development time to integrate new data formats. Long lead times in integrating new data resulted in long lead times in integrating new business partners. Large numbers of Access databases and programs were difficult to track and posed risks related to regulatory compliance and customer data privacy. Validation rules were scattered in many different systems making it difficult to consistently enforce these rules. The bank needed software with interactive data transformation and cleansing functionality that they could use without day-to-day involvement of IT resources. 

Enter Astera Centerprise

The bank was attracted to Centerprise Data Integrator’s ability to handle bulk amounts of data, as well as its unparalleled breadth of data transformation capabilities. 

Astera worked closely with the customer to design a solution using Centerprise Data Integrator to provide interactive data transformation and cleansing functionalities that the business group could use without day–to–day involvement of IT resources. The solution also used Centerprise Integration Framework APIs for integration with upstream systems, such as third–party servicing management applications. 

Data quality improvements were achieved using a combination of Centerprise data validation rules and profiling reports. Data profile XML was used to create deficiency workflow tasks for upstream systems that worked with business partners to correct any data issues. Additionally, the validation rules that were once dispersed in various databases were now combined and stored in Centerprise’s centralized repository.  

Finally, integration with upstream servicing management systems was accomplished using the Centerprise integration framework–a suite of APIs based on Microsoft .NET platform. 

Overall, the project met and surpassed all of its goals, including rapid integration of new business partners, major productivity increases for the servicing acquisition group, creation of a centralized repository of transformation and validation rules, and elimination of Access databases and programs. What once took 20 people to accomplish now takes one person. The time for onboarding new partners has been cut from three-four weeks to less than one week. 

Future phases will incorporate new versions of Centerprise to achieve a tighter integration with other systems, pushing data quality management to the front of the process where business partners can validate data before transferring it. Astera is working with the customer to explore leveraging Centerprise’s data transformation, validation, and profiling capability to other business areas such as asset acquisition and data integration.