Aligning Business Intelligence with Strategic Growth

The Customer

Premier Credit Limited was established in Kenya in 2013 as a credit-only microfinance for corporates, government and individual entrepreneurs. This is a start-up whose management team has over 15 years of industry experience and that has experienced rapid growth. It expanded into Uganda in 2014, and an acquisition in July 2015 in Tanzania prompted further growth. It now has some 21,000 clients in Kenya, 10,000 in Uganda and 5,000 in Tanzania, all following the same business model of offering credit only microfinance, largely to self-employed and small business owners. 

The Requirement

• Monitor growth of a rapidly expanding MFI

• Month-end reporting was becoming ever more  challenging using Excel

• Hiring consultants to build equivalent reports would have been costly & time consuming

The problem with such rapid expansion in a business that is very much volumes based, is that it becomes very hard to keep on top of the various loans portfolios and to know where the sweet spots and the risks lie, according to Tim Carson, CEO at Premier. 

Through Premier’s relationship with their core banking company  Mambu, BankBI was introduced. The beauty of this solution was that, as a small company, Premier does not have the time or financial resource to employ consultants to build a solution, but with BankBI it was able to integrate the BankBI financial performance and banking performance applications via the existing Mambu API.

By integrating with Mambu, BankBI gives Premier yield, growth and revenue analysis, the aim being to harness BankBI’s capabilities when it comes to accuracy, speed and granularity over financial performance data.

The firm also needed to be able to perform trend analysis – looking to the recent past to predict future activity. This would allow for the pinpointing of future sweet-spots and allow focus there. 

The Solution

The addition of BankBI’s business intelligence and analytics offering to Mambu’s complementary solutions eco-system was first discussed by the two organisations in late 2014. Close collaboration over time resulted in BankBI developing an adaptor for the Mambu  API layer which enables automated cloud-to cloud data integration on a daily basis.

Having pre-mapped the Mambu model, the BankBI team were almost instantly able to make sense of Premier Credit’s data.

• BankBI quickly automated the extraction, transformation and load of data from Premier Credit’s Mambu core banking systems.

• Started using BankBI Financial Performance in March 2015 and Banking Performance was delivered in early 2016.

Premier started to use BankBI for financial performance, which was quickly extended to Uganda. The banking performance application has also now been rolled out, with Tanzania to follow.

As part of the service, BankBI worked to streamline existing reports and set up new ones that were tailored to Premier’s business model. This initially was done manually, but as soon as the application was installed, reporting became fully automated and some tweaks could be made to customise and fine tune the data.

The Result

Timely month-end management reporting packs delivered as dashboards within the applications and in PDF format for internal and external stakeholders and investors

Regional managers, branch managers and loan officers can access scorecards to track their month-to-date performance, on a daily basis, for their loan disbursements vs. targets

Financial and banking performance applications providing key financial results and supporting growth of loan outreach in both Kenya and Uganda

Although initially just interested in financial reporting, Premier is now looking to install daily branch performance reporting capability. “This will give visibility and flexibility to our operational team,” says Carson.

One of the key benefits of working with BankBI  is that the system is entirely cloud based. This means that all the hard work; the installation, the upgrades and the maintenance is — performed remotely. It is one less thing for Premier to worry about. “We will always have access to our data and reports and we are future proofed when it comes to capacity and upgrades.”

Carson is really positive about the way BankBI have sought to work collaboratively with Premier while taking on the vast majority of the initial work themselves.