Since it opened for business in 1935, Community Choice Credit Union has grown to become one of the most trusted and respected financial institutions in Michigan, with 22 branches across the state serving the needs of more than 115,000 members. A progressive organization offering a wide range of financial services, it has embraced eCommerce and mobile banking alongside more traditional investment and insurance products.
A legacy reporting system that was slowing down plans to develop advanced analytics undermined a mission to be at the leading edge of its sector. Reports came out as Excel and CSV files, an arduous manual process that was often inaccurate and limited by the siloed systems that produced them. Several alternatives were explored, including going the CRM route with Salesforce and BI tools like Microsoft Power BI and Tableau.
In the end, Pyramid Analytics won out for several reasons, as Pedro Tan, Assistant Vice President of Data Analytics, explained. “It’s a robust and flexible product in terms of data integration, and the predictive analytics toolsets are very capable,” he said. “And because we don’t have a big team, Pyramid’s support from a technical standpoint was always going to be useful, particularly in how we developed data models.”
Licensed for 100 users and installed on-premises, Pyramid has been widely adopted by multiple business units, including retail, lending, eCommerce, marketing, risk management, and inside its contact center. Insights are also used strategically by C-suite management and project teams for identifying merger opportunities and new retail locations.
The analytics process starts when data from multiple third-party sources is pulled into an SQL warehouse. The Pyramid platform sits on top of it, applying built-in ETL and a range of dashboard and reporting services tailored to the different stakeholders. “We are able to create dashboards quickly and easily, giving users access not only to the data but to the information within the dashboard data models that they can ‘slice and dice,’” explained Tan.
For example, in the retail division, branch managers, member center managers, assistant managers, and personal advisors have access to valuable insights that drive customer engagement. As well as tracking new memberships, they can monitor product performance and cross-sells, how many people upgrade from a standard to a more feature-rich account, for example.
They analyze the most used products and services and target members most likely to take out another service, such as a car loan or an investment portfolio. “Based on a member’s behavior, which we’ve measured through Pyramid, we can see who might be a good candidate for a particular type of product or service,” explained Eric Righetti, Assistant Vice President of Retail Delivery.
“With key metrics available on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis, it helps us focus on the things we want to target as an organization, to really understand the behaviors of our members and be proactive in reaching out to them.”
– Eric Righetti, AVP Retail Delivery at Community Choice Credit Union
The most significant benefit for Community Choice is how Pyramid has advanced a strategy to become more data-driven, enabling a progressive credit union to differentiate itself from competitors further. Seeing benefits in operational efficiency has helped embed analytics in the company’s culture.
Even better, having the Pyramid Decision Intelligence Platform supports a journey of continual improvement, taking advantage of increasingly sophisticated analytics. Work is now underway to build on predictive with prescriptive analytics, using optimization modeling to determine the best way forward instead of interpreting past trends to make future decisions.
Eric Righetti described it as putting the credit union “ahead of the game” as a one-stop provider. “With key metrics available on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis, it helps us focus on the things we want to target as an organization, to really understand the behaviors of our members and be proactive in reaching out to them,” he said.
Faster time to insights, cost savings, and providing the organization with a repository of deeper knowledge are among the tangible business benefits. “It’s definitely saved hundreds of hours of manual reporting each month, and the automation in the platform has helped with accuracy as well as saving time by removing manual error,” said Pedro Tan.
The self-service aspect of Pyramid’s platform has also been important, enabling senior management to pull up insights to share at meetings. Dynamic filtering and drill-down capabilities make light work of putting data into the hands of the people who need it. “Pyramid just gives us more,” said Eric Righetti. “It allows us to work smarter rather than harder; it allows our teams to dive in deeper and get a better understanding of members and their behaviors.’’
Pedro Tan complimented Pyramid for fulfilling the role of a strategic partner, “Pyramid Analytics has been a wonderful strategic partner and allowed us to become more data-driven and more efficient. We are now players in actionable analytics, and the Pyramid platform is a very comprehensive platform that allows us to have data analytics at our credit union.”
Pyramid Analytics has been a wonderful strategic partner and allowed us to become more data-driven and more efficient. We are now players in actionable analytics, and the Pyramid platform is a very comprehensive platform that allows us to have data analytics at our credit union.
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