Ecology Building Society are a financial services provider offering ethical Mortgages and Savings products. They are a building society dedicated to improving the environment by supporting and promoting ecological building practices and sustainable communities.
Together, Hippo and Ecology Building Society successfully collaborated on the implementation of a new and improved cloud-enabled data platform, allowing the business to unlock the value of their data.
Client needs
Ecology was in significant need of a robust, scalable data warehouse and business intelligence platform to enhance and accelerate their capabilities in portfolio analysis, customer insight and credit risk management.
A new team was formed following retirement of previous staff. Hippo were engaged to develop the solution following an early data analysis, discovery & prototyping engagement.
Hippo’s approach
Solutions provided
- Delivery Management using MS DevOps
- Agile Scrum
- Business Analysis
- Engineering & Testing
- Consultancy
Technologies utilised
- MS Azure Data Factory
- MS Azure PaaS SQL
- On-Premise Data Gateway
- vNet peering
- Azure Linked Services & identities
- Terraform
- Power BI
Hippo designed the high & low-level architectures for an end-to-end data integration pipeline, warehousing data and developing a new data model for analytics and reporting across the Mortgages & Savings portfolios.
The team conducted SME, stakeholder & data analysis to develop a new data dictionary & definition governance approach whilst using terraform to implement the data pipeline and model patterns. Analysis outputs were then translated into implemented business logic within the new pipeline.
The outputs were then used to develop the first iteration of a centralised, curated analytics model within Power BI service to support and replicate a suite of existing portfolio reports. The team also supported the learning & handover of the new client team to adopt & manage the new platform.
Value added for Ecology Building Society
Immediate value add
Ecology Building Society was able to increase the reliability of the pipeline and reduce run-time from several hours and a significant load on source systems to under 1 hour, as well as enabling potential for intra-day incremental data loads. Their current solution can continue to run in parallel until decommissioned without any impact on load performance
The client is now also able to provide more granular reporting & analysis over and above the existing suite of aggregated reports, enabling consumers to ask more complex questions of the business’ data.
Likewise, they also now have a transparent data lineage able to support audit and regulatory processes.
Future value add
Ecology now has the ability to extend and scale their data platform to incorporate new systems and datasets in a robust, patterned way, minimising the future cost of development and analysis, giving more resource time to business insights and risk management.
