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Case Study

Synergy Creates New Member Opportunities and by Adopting Financial Performance Management

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synergy-credit-union

Sector

Credit Union

Regions

Canada

 

BankBI Applications

Financial Performance

Banking Performance

Regulatory Reporting

Integrations

Fiserv DNA

Fiserv FAS

Getting Started

After attending the BankBI webinar in October 2020, Synergy immediately contacted us to find out more. As part of the evaluation process, we provide credit unions with a full demo version of the BankBI software to introduce them to the application ahead of any commitment.

After meeting with Synergy to discuss their requirements and review our capability, we provided them with access to our online fully featured demo system. This unrestricted access allowed the Synergy team members to evaluate and experience the financial and banking performance capabilities of BankBI in their own time and at their own pace.

Following the positive evaluation of BankBI, Synergy agreed to proceed and set a start date of February 2021, once they had finalised their year-end and audit process.

The Need

Synergy faced a common problem – they had data available, but no way of consolidating it. The data required someone to manually bring it together via a static program like Excel to try and garner results from it, but this process is constantly marred by errors and mistakes, and over time it became harder to validate and effectively audit. When filled with so many manual steps, the process becomes more difficult.

“Really, I think I can speak for most credit unions – we know how nightmarish it is reporting to CUDGE. We have multiple spreadsheets, multiple data resources that we have to pull together and compile and it can take hours[…]It’s just an endless amount of manual keying.”

Alyssa Siegel, Synergy Credit Union
Manager of Finance & Accounting

BankBI was able to leverage the investment Synergy had already made in data warehouse capability and use this alongside our pre-integration with Fiserv DNA and FAS. While data warehouses can be valuable tools to tackle data challenges, it’s often the last mile of reporting where they fall short. BankBI can leverage data warehouses to provide the automated reporting layer that is needed.

Synergy reports to their regulator, the credit union deposit guarantee scheme of Saskatchewan, every quarter. Their reports pull information from:

  • Their general ledger accounting system
  • Core banking data
  • Investment data
  • Loan application data

Consolidating all of this information manually can be overwhelming and Synergy saw the value of automation in regulatory reporting – one of the key tenets of our value proposition. At the time, and in common with many credit unions in Canada, their reporting was time-consuming, error-prone, and manual in terms of running scripts to get data and then collating it all on Excel. Synergy made it clear that they wanted to turn their process into one that was fully automated end-to-end.

“The advantages of automating access to our data goes well beyond just driving better financial performance for Synergy – it’s highly impactful to our members, as they are also our owners and derive benefits from our success.”

Christine Tucker, Synergy Credit Union
Chief Financial Officer

The Solution

As experts in financial performance as a service for Credit Unions, we were very confident that we’d be able to help Synergy. Looking at their Excel sheets, it was clear it would be nearly impossible for an independent auditor to validate their results due to their complexity. Synergy was running the risk that the validation of their data was only as good as the person validating it.

Having visibility over your data is crucial when trying to utilise it properly. With BankBI, everything can be computed within the application and presented in the required format. This is why we knew we’d be a perfect fit – you’re effectively reducing institutional risk with the regulator when you use BankBI. We were able to seamlessly connect to their data warehouse, core DNA system, and general ledger to get the job done.

“Our solution mitigates the potential for human error and automates the repeatable processes in the data management, ensuring that financial institutions like Synergy can streamline their reporting to meet current and future regulatory requirements, on time and with confidence.”

Graham Goble, BankBI
CEO

Synergy wanted to have that automation from the beginning, and they saw the value in the three key components offered by BankBI in their value proposition.

Delivery

We began delivery of the project in February. At the start of the project, Synergy was quickly up and running daily on financial and banking performance, with the main data they had flowing into those two core modules, to be fully live at the end of June.

Credit Unions like Synergy can face challenges in reconciling their data on a daily basis. BankBI brings those disparate data sources together to provide accurate financial information. Synergy was slightly different to Crossroads Credit Union because they already had a data warehouse at their disposal, which we were happy to use. When someone has invested in a data warehouse, we don’t turn around and say they shouldn’t have done that. Instead, we helped Synergy create value from that investment, as it ensured they would be able to provide us with the extracts.

“It looks pretty fantastic – the automation itself is going to save us hours. I can’t imagine…it’s endless, the opportunities I see here with us”

Alyssa Siegel, Synergy Credit Union
Manager of Finance & Reporting

Working with Synergy was incredibly effective; we were able to leverage their in-house IT and data warehousing skills alongside the automated extracts to make rapid progress to results and build confidence in the assured delivery of BankBI.

The fact that Synergy had already invested in data warehouse capability meant that the BankBI top down approach to data met with their bottom up data capability. We were able to leverage their data warehouse to create additional efficiencies and cost-savings in that final mile of reporting.

Wherever you are in the data journey, BankBI can work with you to automate and streamline reporting and analytics and help add value to your existing technology investment.

Results

Thanks to Synergy’s IT capability, we’ve been able to progress the project with no issues. Data for the March quarter end has already been run through the application and Synergy did the same with June’s.

Synergy was right to quickly identify the benefits of automating their regulatory reporting. The automation of their processes resulted in the amount of time spent by people validating being massively reduced by 3 or 4 days a quarter. This is in addition to all of the other benefits of using the BankBI application, such as getting the data right, accurate, and audited, helping to fulfil the BankBI promise to our clients.

“The solution will provide that deeper level of insight into our performance, ultimately enabling us to make future-forward decisions that mutually benefit us, our members, and our community.”

Christine Tucker, Synergy Credit Union
Chief Financial Officer

BankBI was initially seen as ‘too good to be true’, we proved our value and provided Synergy with a professional service where we took on the bulk of the work, empowering the client to be able to freely look at and use their data without having to collate it themselves. Looking to the future, having the chance to finally sit down with their data opened Synergy’s eyes to a re-evaluation of some of their processes to ensure they’re capturing data in the right way.

Synergy had a problem faced by many credit unions. Working with them in this way provided them with the opportunity to flush out some of those extra value propositions that weren’t necessarily considered beforehand and were only exposed when the details of their processes were revealed, enabling them to see the deficiencies, and most importantly, the opportunities in their data that they couldn’t see before.

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