ATB Financial: Accelerating SAP data insights and boosting business outcomes with BigQuery
About ATB Financial
ATB Financial is an Alberta, Canada-based financial institution with nearly CA$55.6 billion in assets. ATB’s more than 5,000 team members love to deliver exceptional experiences to over 800,000 clients through hundreds of branches and agencies, a 24-hour Client Care Centre, four entrepreneur centers, and multiple digital banking options.
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Google Cloud results
- Enables business insights from multiple data sources 117 times faster than previous approaches
- Boosts security and reliability of data environment, improving data governance and easing regulatory adherence
- Realizes millions in efficiency and technology cost savings by retiring legacy environment
- Readies for the future of banking in Canada including real-time personalized advice to clients and additional revenue growth
Jobs executed in seconds rather than hours
Founded in Alberta in 1938 to give citizens an alternative source of credit during the Great Depression, ATB Financial (ATB) is now the province’s largest financial institution. Like many financial services companies, ATB continuously seeks to innovate to expand services, increase client satisfaction, and achieve operational efficiencies to compete with big, established banks as well as financial technology startups.
ATB recently embarked on a data center modernization initiative, migrating its core SAP-based banking applications from an on-premises data center to an SAP-certified, all-VM based architecture on Google Cloud. The impacts have been impressive, including a significant boost in business agility, reduced TCO, and an overall acceleration of digital transformation.
As part of ATB’s multiyear digital transformation objectives, changes were needed to the legacy data platform. Analytics processes were ad hoc and deeply manual, often requiring multiple data copies and heavy manipulation to produce reports. The legacy data environment needed enhancements to support future business requirements that have a high dependency on real-time data analysis and insights.
“We use BigQuery and Google Cloud to build our modern data applications. We see our data platform as foundational to enabling ATB’s 10-year strategic vision.”
—Dan Semmens, Head of Data and AI, ATB FinancialBetter decisions made faster
After evaluating several potential solutions, ATB chose BigQuery as a serverless data warehouse and data lake for its next-generation, cloud-native architecture. BigQuery serves as a core component of what ATB calls its Data Exposure Enablement Platform (DEEP). This next-generation platform replaces the bank’s legacy monolithic data architecture, providing a standardized enterprise data model that eliminates inefficiencies and inconsistencies and simplifies analytics.
“We use BigQuery and Google Cloud to build our modern data applications,” explains Dan Semmens, Head of Data and AI at ATB. “We see our data platform as foundational to enabling ATB’s 10-year strategic vision.”
With BigQuery, ATB can now:
- Acquire and ingest data from a variety of internal and external sources, at scale, in real-time
- Enrich data through advanced analytics and artificial intelligence, providing valuable insights for decision-makers, with breakthrough speed
- Enable self-service analytics for all internal organizations, making data more accessible through easy-to-use reports, dashboards, and data visualization tools
- Expose data and machine learning models through APIs, with real-time alerts and notifications for interactive applications
Before BigQuery, ATB was able to manage only structured data using its traditional data warehouse platform. Now, the bank analyzes structured data as well as an array of unstructured data including censor data, video, music, images, and social media content. This next-generation solution helps ATB financial and treasury analysts, risk management experts, client services and sales representatives, marketing specialists, data scientists, and other professionals make faster, better-informed business decisions.
Intuitive self-service tools also enable users to visualize and explore data and generate reports without compromising data security or integrity. More than 400 ATB managers rely on BigQuery to increase insights, optimize business processes, and forecast trends. BigQuery provides strong security and fine-grained access controls to help the bank protect and govern data across the entire life cycle.
“We can deliver our 160 key business insights two or three orders of magnitude faster with BigQuery. When you think about our marketing campaigns and month-end finance processes, we're talking about jobs that used to take five to eight hours to complete that are now running in seconds.”
—Dan Semmens, Head of Data and AI, ATB FinancialAccelerating delivery of new datasets and business insights
ATB has ingested and classified 80% of its roughly 50 TBs of core SAP banking data from CRM, banking services, payments, accounting, and HR modules, as well as secured data from a variety of third-party services including a treasury and cash management platform provider, a credit card provider, and a call center software provider. This next-generation data platform helps ATB standardize and simplify its data pipeline process and toolchain, accelerating the delivery of new datasets by 30% compared to previous approaches.
In less than a year, the firm introduced more than 160 priority business insights that are leveraged in a variety of applications including credit health decision models, financial reporting and forecasting, and operational reporting for various business functions.
BigQuery can analyze petabytes of data at blazing-fast speeds with zero overhead, helping the bank expose top business insights over 117 times faster than with its previous solution. “We can deliver our 160 key business insights two or three orders of magnitude faster with BigQuery,” explains Semmens. “When you think about our marketing campaigns and month-end finance processes, we're talking about jobs that used to take five to eight hours to complete that are now running in seconds.”
Advanced AI and ML capabilities in BigQuery allow ATB to improve client care and client satisfaction by enabling personalized interactions and contextual recommendations. Over 40 machine-learning models generate 20,000+ AI-assisted conversations per month. As a result, ATB has improved suggestive selling and increased upsell revenues.
With BigQuery, ATB can ingest and analyze massive volumes of batch and real-time data, at scale, surmounting previously unsolvable challenges. For example, a new time-series ML model detects fraudulent activity that evaded earlier fraud management processes. The solution eliminates resource-intensive and time-consuming manual review processes, enabling the bank to avoid theft and reputational damage, while improving team member productivity.
Improving responsiveness to support clients amid a pandemic
The Google Cloud solution clearly proved its worth during the COVID-19 pandemic by helping the bank intelligently identify clients in financial distress. “With our BigQuery predictive analytics, we were able to automatically comb through data to find businesses and individuals severely impacted by COVID-19,” says Semmens. “Our relationship managers proactively reached out to clients in their time of need, offering them payment deferrals, fee waivers, debt restructuring, and other options to ease financial stress.”
ATB’s next-generation data platform also helps the bank efficiently manage data quality across the data pipeline. Using BigQuery, ATB improved quality for its top-priority client data by about 35% year-over-year.
“We’ve basically implemented a valve in our ELT process so we can monitor quality and identify issues with our enterprise data model,” explains Semmens. “When we think about data quality, we know issues can exist at the front end within applications, they could be process related, or they could be introduced at the time of data transformation. Now that we have proper monitoring in place, we can quickly pinpoint and resolve quality issues.”
“BigQuery has generated a lot of excitement at ATB. Business users now have the data they need to make better decisions—right at their fingertips.”
—Dan Semmens, Head of Data and AI, ATB FinancialTransforming operations and boosting business results
BigQuery and Google Cloud help ATB realize millions in revenue gains, TCO reductions, productivity savings, and loss prevention improvements.
The solution enables IT teams at the bank to:
- Reduce operating expenses and complexity by migrating its infrastructure to the cloud
- Accelerate time-to-value and improve choice by leveraging more third-party services
- Mitigate risk by securing data, improving governance, and increasing service availability
- Be ready for initiatives like Open Banking as well as the ability to provide real-time personalized advice for clients to drive revenue growth
The bank’s business leaders now enjoy more read access to data, allowing them to make better-informed decisions in real time. Data scientists and analysts enjoy easy-to-use data visualization, analysis, and reporting capabilities.
All of this translates to increased productivity across business units. ATB has leveraged these improvements to increase in client satisfaction and revenues through contextual recommendations and customized interactions, while also leveraging them to reduce theft and reputational damage through stronger fraud detection.
“BigQuery has generated a lot of excitement at ATB,” says Semmens. “Business users now have the data they need to make better decisions—right at their fingertips. The solution has created a spirit of camaraderie across analytics teams, as well. With our previous architecture, analysts often operated in silos. Now they are spontaneously collaborating and sharing knowledge and best practices, which really speeds up results.”
Learn more about how Google Cloud analytics for SAP can accelerate business insights.
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About ATB Financial
ATB Financial is an Alberta, Canada-based financial institution with nearly CA$55.6 billion in assets. ATB’s more than 5,000 team members love to deliver exceptional experiences to over 800,000 clients through hundreds of branches and agencies, a 24-hour Client Care Centre, four entrepreneur centers, and multiple digital banking options.