Massive Consolidation: Česká spořitelna Connects 100+ Projects into a Unified Self-Service Data Management Platform

Business Category:

Finance

Company Size:

Large Enterprises

4.5 milion

Clients

400

Branches

100 +

Data Projects

About Česká spořitelna  

Česká spořitelna is one of the largest and oldest banks in the Czech Republic. Founded in 1825, it offers a wide range of financial services, including personal banking, business banking, and investment services. As part of the Erste Group, a major European financial services provider, Česká spořitelna plays a significant role in the Czech banking sector and is known for its extensive network of branches and ATMs throughout the country.

Keboola has started to help us reduce data silos in the bank by offering a self-service platform that enables quick onboarding and ease of use.

It has made working with data accessible to people for whom it would otherwise be nearly impossible.

Petr Polák, Data Platforms Domain Lead

The Challenge:

Data Access and Availability

Česká spořitelna’s main challenges were:

Fragmented Infrastructure

Česká spořitelna had a complicated stack of varied data sources with limited data access. To compile a report or perform analytics, the users often needed to combine data from several siloed sources. Additionally, workflows often required technical knowledge and understanding of the complex infrastructure, putting many tasks out of reach of business teams.

Shadow IT

While the users had unified data coming from a data warehouse, it needed to be enriched with additional information for reporting and analysis, as a result teams relied on Excel and unauthorized data integrations. Mitigating this required complicated manual processes setup by a limited cohort of technical specialists, and the time-to-value of data initiatives left a lot to be desired.

The Traditional Data Stack Works Well, but…

Only for a Few Business-Critical Use Cases.

The Solution

Together with Keboola, Česká spořitelna built a self-service data management solution for the whole bank, connecting 180+ active users across around 70 teams, working on more than a 100+ data projects which consumes data from Oracle Databases (DWH), Salesforce CRM, marketing applications, HR systems, many other dispersed data sources and simple Excel spreadsheets and .csv files connected under one platform, democratizing the data and making it easily accessible.

Use Cases

How Česká spořitelna uses Keboola

Use Case #1

Unified View for All Banking Products

With Keboola, Česká spořitelna managed to federate all financial products from loans, mortgages, savings, checking, and money market accounts, investments, etc. and bring them together under a single datamart.

The new setup allows analysts to query data faster and helps support tactical decisions.

This level of governance and integration between the teams would not be possible without Keboola data platform.

Iveta Svobodová, Product Owner, Customer Solutions

Use Case #2

Data-Driven Branch Strategy

With Keboola, Česká spořitelna was able to perform a holistic view analysis of it’s branches across the Czech Republic, helping management make informed decisions: what branches should be closed, what branches should be expanded, and where a new branch should be opened.

We’ve been able to garner more accurate and timely insights and make better-informed strategic decisions.

Jiří červený, Customer Journey Expert

Use Case #3

People & Culture

Onboarding new employees and talent retention are big priorities for the Česká spořitelna. With Keboola, many HR-related use cases like learning, development, and employer experience were consolidated under a unified datamart. The system is easy to use thanks to no-code and low-code transformations, and sandboxes that allow teams to have control over their data and experiment.

Additionally, the People & Culture team launched the Data for Dummies project to improve data literacy across the teams.

If not for Keboola, all this — learning, developing, employee experience — would have to be done with Excel somehow, with no visualization for the managers. Overall, we’ve seen elevated data quality and improvement in governance. A big win.

Jan Procházka, IT Domain Lead: Employee Experience 

Use Case #4

Data-Driven Customer Care

For the biggest bank in the country, making sure the customers, both corporate and individual, receive the best service is a top priority. With Keboola, Česká spořitelna managed to automate and optimize CRM management, connecting several extractors (Oracle, Microsoft SQL) and consolidating customer data. Transformed data is then fed into the internal systems to enable bankers to give best advice to customers and make timely service offers, and also helping Česká spořitelna communicate with corporate customers leveraging Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

Thanks to Keboola, we are able to collect data from more sources (DWH, MS SQL) and load corporate client information into a one unified data model. We are able to provide this data to Salesforce Marketing Cloud and to our CRM. As a result, our bankers have up-to-date information about clients, and we are able to communicate relevant information and offers to our corporate client. With Keboola, the business team was able to create the solution themselves with minimal help and support from IT, and they are able to run it on their own.

David Lacina, Corporate Business Data Lead

The Impact:

More Than a 100 Projects Unified Within a Self-Service Data Management Platform

Data Governance

Thanks to Keboola, Česká spořitelna’s massive data framework was consolidated into a single place. Better security, faster data processing, and improved data governance—all thanks to a one-platform approach.

Data Enablement

Teams that were previously barred from the data world are now able to resolve their own data requests with Keboola, finally making many long-tail analytics use cases possible.  

Data Democratization

Data is easily shared and disseminated between departments. With a self-service approach, data became accessible to end users without needing to rely on the central team.

Faster Time to value

New initiatives now take weeks instead of months.

With Keboola, Česká spořitelna is on track to improve data governance and self-service processes even further while delivering substantial business value across the bank.

Keboola has significantly improved and expanded our self-service data capabilities, and in Keboola we have found an effective weapon in the fight against shadow IT.

Pavel Matějka, enterprise data architect