"I have had the privilege of working with the UDig team in the Technology space for more than 15 years. It has been great partnering with a local company and developing a mutually beneficial relationship."
Financial Services
Turning Opportunity Into Solid, Growth-Driving Data
Strategic Risk Associates (SRA) is a consulting firm that developed Watchtower, an industry-leading financial risk management tool that financial institutions use to evaluate their health and anticipate future issues. The Watchtower dashboard gives boards of directors a clear view of their organizations’ risk metrics, with straightforward green, yellow, or red indicators for each Key Risk Indicator (KRI).
When SRA came to UDig, they were negotiating a strategic partnership with one of the three largest core banking platforms. This relationship would provide access to previously unavailable financial data, as well as the thousands of banks already using the platform. With this new information, SRA had the opportunity to quickly scale their business — if they could accurately and efficiently integrate the data.
How We Went from Ideas to Impact
The Idea
Scale the Business With Accurate & Efficient Data Integrations
While the partnership created powerful growth potential for SRA, they were concerned about data lineage and data overload. SRA wanted to ensure that users would trust the data they received, so making its path clear and auditable was critical. The application also needed to be prepared to handle the increased data stream without technical errors or massive manual inputs.
Ultimately, SRA wanted a team who could help them accurately and efficiently integrate the data into their existing system. They wanted to seize this opportunity to quickly scale their business and anticipate any potential challenges on the horizon.
The Process
Build a Data Architecture Based on Guiding Principles
UDig worked with SRA to design a cloud-based data architecture that supports their needs, while helping them become autonomous as they build their internal technology team. Our goal was to create a scalable, flexible platform that would incorporate data from the new partnership — and easily integrate additional information sources when they arose.
The following principles guided our work:
- Flexibility: The scalable, cloud-based architecture addresses the needs of SRA today and in the future with limited rework.
- Focus: The design considers only what is necessary for ingesting new data sources and creating analytics.
- Lineage: Transparency is key to getting users to trust data, so the design will provide a clear view of data from its original source to its final destination — and any moves and changes in between.
- Ease: The architecture prioritizes cloud platforms as we strive to reduce the need for manual engineering or infrastructure maintenance.
- Value: By using cloud-based architecture, our recommendations considered cost analysis, functionality and security benchmarks.
The Impact
Controlled Risk for End Clients to Make Informed, Important Decisions
Through our design and implementation, we enhanced SRA’s product offering on a modern technology stack by creating features that can share timely data and deepen their competitive advantage.
We helped SRA efficiently integrate their powerful new data sources without technical errors. Because trust in data was central to SRA’s strategy, our solution design also centered on that goal. The architecture provides better data management, accepts multiple data sources, and offers greater data history and trend analysis. As a result, SRA is prepared to give customers the clean, meaningful information they need to control risk and make their most important decisions.
While we have finished building SRA’s solution and given their team the tools and insight they need to succeed, we are always here to help as they continue to grow. In fact, UDig’s local consulting team continues to act as an extension of SRA’s internal team to hedge concerns about scaling at the pace needed to support customer demand. As a strategic, long-term partner, we will continue supporting SRA as their needs change and technology evolves.
- How We Did ItCloud SelectionData Strategy & Roadmap DesignPlatform Analysis & SelectionPrototypingWarehouse Acceleration
- Tech StackAWS LambdaAWS S3JavaScriptPythonSnowflakeSQLTableau