Accelerating the delivery of new digital initiatives with confidence
Success Story Financial Services
Rural Bank Modernizes Lending Capabilities with New Data Warehouse PlatformApexon puts new centralized data infrastructure in place to enable new insights and speed cycle time 
This bank is part of the US Farm Credit System and has been lending financial and business support to agriculture and rural America for more than a century.
The company is committed to moving into the future with a progressive mindset and a passionate workforce to respond to rapid changes in the technology and business landscape. The bank strives to serve as an extension of the associations it serves, providing systems and services that can be optimized by leveraging economies of scale and centralization.
Apexon began its strategic partnership with the bank in December of 2019 starting with the current state assessment of its enterprise data warehouse and finance data warehouse.
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Headquarters in Columbia, SC
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Wholesale lender, BSP to local Farm and Ag credit associations
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Provides real estate, production financing to 80,000 farmers, agribusiness and rural homeowners
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A $37 billion company, largest financial institution based in South Carolina, and one of four wholesale banks within the nationwide Farm Credit System
The customer journey
- Current State Analysis of data assets
- Build a roadmap to address the challenges identified
- Build Investment Data Mart
- Build application to make adjustments on investment data
- Build applications to adjust Mask data and report to Funding corp
- Rewrite Loan Data Mart
- Rewrite application to make adjustments on Loan data
- User acceptance testing the Data Marts and application
- Onboard business users and execute parallel runs
- Decommission Finance data Warehouse and Cognos application
the Results
Key Outcomes
Increased Flexibility
& Ease of Use
& Ease of Use
Higher Customer
Satisfaction
Satisfaction
Operational
Efficiency
Efficiency
Go Digital
Be digital
Creating the infrastructure and foundation to scale digital initiatives
Evolve Digital
Leveraging data and analytics to continuously improve digital delivery processes
Enable digital adoption in a quick, and agile manner
Apexon helped assess the current state and identified opportunities to enhance the bank’s current data assets.
Build digital infrastructure and foundation for enterprises to scale
Apexon built a roadmap showing the transformation of existing data assets and the addition of new data assets.
Leverage data engineering to make strategic decisions and get digital right every time
The challenge
Building a New platform
The bank wanted to become a truly “data-powered” company. This required building an enterprise data warehouse platform to bring all the data assets together to address several challenges:
Incomplete source data in its enterprise data warehouse
A lack of best practices in data modelling
Inability to maintain and support the application to make adjustments to data
Data adjustment being completed in multiple places
Unsupported version of on-prem Hyperion in use
Incomplete Hyperion cubes required to build new Investment and District cubes
The solution
propose & execute a four-phase plan
The Apexon data services team understood the challenges faced with existing data assets like enterprise data warehouse and finance data warehouse. Apexon proposed and executed on a four-phase plan to address the bank’s needs:
Phase 1
Migrate Data Marts
Migrate the data marts (loan/finance) in the bank’s finance data warehouse to an enterprise data warehouse platform and decommission the finance data warehouse. This ensured that all data would be available on the same platform.
Custom Application
Build a custom application to replicate the functionality from the bank’s Cognos application and then decommission it.
Investment Cube
Build an investment cube to process investment data and load Hyperion cube for the business to generate reports.
Upgrade Hyperion
Upgrade Hyperion from 11.1.2.4 to 11.2.6 to extend Oracle support to the on-prem Hyperion application.
Phase 2
Migrate loan data mart
Migrate loan data mart from finance data warehouse to enterprise data warehouse platform.
Rewrite Existing Application
Rewrite the existing Adjust It application to accommodate approval of adjustments.
Phase 3
Migrate Finance data mart
Migrate the finance data mart from the finance data warehouse to the enterprise data warehouse platform.
Phase 4
Build ETL
Build ETL to process the District from loan/finance/investment data marts.
Build Application
Build an application to adjust the District data before loading the Hyperion cubes.
Build Hyperion Cubes
Build Hyperion cubes to load the District data and generate reports for users.
Key Outcomes
Increased Flexibility & Ease of Use The new application’s ability to make adjustments to data and process it in near real-time gives the bank the ability to configure the business rules and process those rules in near real time. Business users can add new fields and make changes to data in the fields. This revised flow of hierarchy reduces cycle time from 48 hours to 20 minutes
Higher Customer Satisfaction New report configuration capability to add/edit/delete the fields in the report and provide approvals to the adjustments made to the data
Scalable Architecture To support inclusion of multiple subject areas to scale