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Getting High Yield Results from Credit Union Data: Part One

Self-service data prep solutions are used by many credit unions throughout the United States to facilitate data-driven decisions, without the pain or cost of data warehousing initiatives. This is accomplished by offering a self-service solution for business users to access data directly from a myriad of transactional and operational reports used by credit unions. How and why credit unions use self-service data prep to get at the high volumes of data spewing from Symitar, Certegy, FDR, Diebold, Visa and more ranges widely. This two-part blog series will cover some of the more common use cases and their results.
ATM Settlements A large Midwest credit union wanted a better way to manage and deal with its daily ATM settlements. The organization needed to match data from its own ATM posting report with additional ATM posting data. This data is usually 4MB or more in size and is sourced by a third party ATM network provider.
Through the use of their self-service data prep solution, the credit union is able to easily mine the pertinent 
data from the ATM reports and identify the transactions that appear in one report and not the other report, making the daily ATM settlements much easier and faster to complete. They are also able to identify “data holes” as well, which came in pretty handy when they experienced a glitch with their third party ATM network provider and 25,000 ATM transactions were not posted automatically. The self-service data prep tool allowed the organization to quickly identify the specific transactions that did not post, which saved a lot of time and avoided a major hassle.
Accrued Interest Reports Have you ever had the need to produce customized accounting and finance data? One credit union wanted better insight into their Accrued Interest Report in order to not recognize accrued interest on loans that were more than 60 days late. With self-service data prep, they’re able to filter out these specific loans, thereby automatically calculating the correct accrual under Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP).
But wait – there’s more. Their self-service data prep capabilities also allow them to transform their banking reports into live, workable data, enabling the organization to define and incorporate new data into high-level reports. Taking advantage of their solution’s ‘lookup’ capability allows them to combine data mined from reports with additional data from other data sources to get one overall view. They also use the ‘lookup’ feature with their Loan Accrual Report, which categorizes each loan by collection type and automatically displays the correct general ledger code for each loan category. By making it easy to create new, customized views of data from multiple sources, accounting and financial analysis are a piece of cake.
Another credit union relies on their self-service data prep tool to extract information from a 500+ page Symitar Accrued Interest Report. The result is a one-page summary report that allows them to quickly and easily see the total number of loans – by loan type and loan rate – without having to waste precious time pouring over reams of data.
Certificate Offerings With a need to make more informed decisions around new certificate offerings, one credit union uses their self-service data prep solution to mine data from their Share Certificate Trial Balance Report. Using the solution’s 'calculated fields' feature they are able to create a new field or column of data, enabling them to categorize certificates based on different ranges of interest rates. With the summary capability, the organization can calculate the count and average balance of each certificate summary. They then perform valuable ‘what 
if’ analyses based on different levels of interest rates and average balances, enabling them to make proactive business decisions regarding what new tiered certificate offerings they should present to their members.
Coming up in Part Two of our Credit Union Data blog series: the value self-service data prep provides to daily teller reports, internal auditing and enhanced customer service.