Aperture Data Studio
Making data quality accessible, independent and agile
Aperture Data Studio is a powerful and easy to use data management suite that helps you manage consumer data projects with confidence, in your own environment.
It enables everyday users to quickly and easily develop sophisticated workflows that incorporate machine learning algorithms for automatic data tagging and enriches the data using globally curated data sets from Experian. This ensures data quality and helps govern adherence to data standards.
Situation
Experian Digital provides clients with merchant transaction enrichment and categorisation so that consumers can more easily identify transactions on their bank statements, either online or in their banking apps, also benefiting from in-app financial wellbeing solutions. The solution matches over 80 fields of metadata related to a merchant to a specific transaction. This enables financial service providers to help their customers easily identify where a purchase was made. This includes details like the company trading name, logo, location and other merchant contact details.
Accuracy of the data is key to the success of the solution, as consumers need to be able to recognise and trust what they see in their banking apps. But maintaining accuracy of all of the data fields requires relentless effort due to the high percentage of changes to specific merchants every month, as well the many different ways a merchant can appear on a bank statement. The Experian Digital team is always looking for ways to improve their transaction data matching accuracy and deliver their services to customers in an agile and efficient way. It is equally important to be able to scale efficiently, staying ahead of the growth of the business and the data by leveraging technology tools rather than adding more people resources.
We take a look at the work undertaken by the Experian Delivery and Data Operations teams to enhance Experian Digital’s capabilities and improve their Data Management.
Challenge
The Data Operations Team within Experian Digital is the owner of the business’s data assets and the direct link between the product and the client. They are the data experts, and they understand what data points make up a complete merchant record, how to find the correct data and collect as many supporting data points as possible.
The Experian Digital team performed an audit of the data asset using Aperture Data Studio and discovered five core challenges that were inhibiting data quality and accuracy.
- Overall data health was challenged due to a lack of asset-wide oversight and the volatile nature of the asset (i.e. merchant details change regularly).
- Technical requests or bespoke builds from the Technology team soaked up valuable resources.
- The Data Operations Team could only review records one at a time.
- There were some permission-based challenges where certain types of data did not need to be seen by certain roles.
- It was difficult to identify specific merchants underlying a transaction through a payment gateway provider.
Once the audit had been completed it was clear there were several operational areas requiring improvement.
“There is no doubt that the increased accuracy and efficiency of our data management in using Aperture Data Studio has been a huge win for our business. But the aspect of this I have been most excited about is that it provided our Data Operations team with a tool that made them self-sufficient to make fast and real time updates, and allowing our Technology team to spend more time building products and integrating with our clients. It has also reduced the manual and administrative effort for our Data Operations team allowing them to focus on more value-add activities that really make a difference to our clients.”
Simone Jemmett, GM of Experian Digital and Head of Strategy
Solution
The Experian Digital team undertook the audit using Aperture Data Studio, and they were quick to identify a number of operational areas that could be enhanced in order to provide improved data accuracy and quality and increase the efficiency of the data operations team.
They also quickly realised that the Data Operations Team would need its own instance going forward, and training on how Aperture Data Studio worked, to help rectify the observed challenges and give them the ability to self-serve independently, creating data quality rules and new workflows.
The initial time to value was just 4 weeks. Overall the program of work continues to grow and evolve, with some staggering benefits and efficiency gains realised.
Results
The implementation of Aperture Data Studio helped Experian Digital become more agile, accurate and efficient. By providing them with the right tools and know-how, they reduced the reliance on the Technology team, had the ability to build and maintain their own data quality rules, and saw uplifts in matching accuracy that supported their customer network.
In particular, Experian Digital saw the following benefits:
- Aperture Data Studio was able to amalgamate all the different merchant data sources that Experian Digital utilises when matching merchant and transaction data and provide a single point of access when the data is being interrogated.
- Aperture was also used to create a series of dashboards from which the Data Operations Team could monitor their core KPIs, such as the “data completion score”
- They created a historic log of all data searches ever performed by customers to better understand the nature of queries and plan fixes more effectively.
- As the single-entry point was through Aperture Data Studio they were able to implement strict permission-based access rules and control access for individual profiles going forwards.
- Aperture Data Studio offered them a single place to interrogate data irregularities. For example, when different data suppliers offered different data points for the same merchant.
- For the first time they could make merchant data changes in bulk; i.e. changing an entire merchant category.
- The Data Operations Team were able to remove their reliance on the Technology team, making required updates more efficient and faster.
- Aperture Data Studio helped streamline in data completeness scores, showing high logo match rates of up to 96.84%
- Easy to use dashboards providing time of day usage insights.
The team were also able to quantify the benefits of their work, with the following improvements realised:
Reduced time
Making updates to the data took two minutes rather than 7+ days via the Technology team.
Removal of manual process
Almost completely removed a manual process to check data entry accuracy that took five hours a day, to just a couple of minutes.
100% uplift
They saw a 100% uplift in matching accuracy for the transactions made through a specific payment gateway provider.
“Integrating Aperture Data Studio into our Data Operations team has allowed for significant improvements across multiple areas. Key areas include improving our data management capabilities, increasing team efficiency, and process improvements which have allowed for better allocation of resources. Not only has Data Studio allowed for uplift in these areas, but it has also provided a valuable opportunity for Data Ops team members to develop & grow their existing data analytics skills.
We look forward to continuing to enrich our ever-growing dataset by using the wide range of tools Data Studio offers.”
Chris Grant, Head of Data Operations