The largest commercial bank in Slovakia has been a part of the country’s history since 1825. Slovenská sporiteľňa cares deeply about the future and prosperity of the country, serving almost 2 million clients and offering a wide range of services in 152 branches across the country. Slovenská sporiteľňa is a recognized market leader, not only for the number of people and businesses relying on its services but also for the innovations it brings to the banking industry every year. The bank has been a part of Erste Group since 2001.
Before the decision to level up the data management, Slovenská sporiteľňa faced challenges in data availability, quality, and consistency. Numerous disjointed data sources didn’t lend themselves to easy reporting. Data was hard to transform into a usable format, the performance was sluggish, and effective automation was a distant dream.
While Slovenská sporiteľňa always had capable analysts, there was no certainty. There was no way to connect data from various data marts and sources and no unified data governance — changes in data marts took ages. Business users mostly relied on Excel and worked in silos. We needed more accuracy, more consistency and more control.
Fragmented and disjointed data sources have been brought together under a unified system of governance. All teams can rely on data quality and consistency, no matter where the data comes from.
The way the teams work with data has been transformed, with more than 100 stakeholders across many teams cooperating effectively, building data solutions together.
The new methodology made automation projects easier, driving performance and helping teams get critical insights quicker.
We have a lot of client information, but connecting it was difficult. With Keboola, we started a new era. At first, it was a challenge for long-time employees to adapt and think about data differently.
Eventually, people started using our data much more effectively.
Digital transformation was approached like a long-term process, best undertaken step-by-step, not as a sudden shift. So even before new data practices and architecture were fully in play, Data Education team embarked on an education campaign to help teams use data: from the basics to the nitty-gritty of the new architecture.
I would say that my role in Slovenská sporiteľňa is Data Evangelization. I spread data news, help people acquire data skills, connect data management with business departments, and connect teams with each other through data.
Before working with Keboola, analytics was processed centrally, and the business teams were siloed. Afterward, everything has changed: the departments not only improved their own analytics capacity but started collaborating. Keboola adoption is still in process, and the teams are busy building a data mart and developing a democratized, self-service data practice.
Keboola has helped us create a very attractive business data environment, without compromising on the strict data governance rules we, as a bank, need to enforce.
HR, like a few other departments within Slovenská sporiteľňa relied on simple analytics with Excel. Data analytics for HR was a long-tail use case that IT would never get to, as it wasn’t directly tied to revenue or customer service. With the new architecture, the department was not only able to do basic analytics and reports themselves, but the new way of looking at data prompted them to hire a dedicated data analyst to support more advanced use cases.
Thanks to Keboola, HR was able to easily create reports for management, providing each stakeholder with visibility of their employees and consolidating all relevant data: home offices, vacations, sick days, and more, all in one place.
Before Slovenská sporiteľňa started using Keboola a lot of the architecture was built around on-premise solutions, while some components were cloud-based, like the BI, the bank needed a decisive push to the cloud.
Keboola has massively kickstarted our cloud data journey; without it, we would probably be doing endless POCs without real business value.
Digital transformation was approached like a long-term process, best undertaken step-by-step, not as a sudden shift. So even before new data practices and architecture were fully in play, Data Education team embarked on an education campaign to help teams use data: from the basics to the nitty-gritty of the new architecture.
I would say that my role in Slovenská sporiteľňa is Data Evangelization. I spread data news, help people acquire data skills, connect data management with business departments, and connect teams with each other through data.
Before working with Keboola, analytics was processed centrally, and the business teams were siloed. Afterward, everything has changed: the departments not only improved their own analytics capacity but started collaborating. Keboola adoption is still in process, and the teams are busy building a data mart and developing a democratized, self-service data practice.
Keboola has helped us create a very attractive business data environment, without compromising on the strict data governance rules we, as a bank, need to enforce.
HR, like a few other departments within Slovenská sporiteľňa, relied on simple analytics with Excel. Data analytics for HR was a long-tail use case that IT would never get to, as it wasn’t directly tied to revenue or customer service. With the new architecture, the department was not only able to do basic analytics and reports themselves, but the new way of looking at data prompted them to hire a dedicated data analyst to support more advanced use cases.
Thanks to Keboola, HR was able to easily create reports for management, providing each stakeholder with visibility of their employees and consolidating all relevant data: home offices, vacations, sick days, and more, all in one place.
Before Slovenská sporiteľňa started using Keboola a lot of the architecture was built around on-premise solutions, while some components were cloud-based, like the BI, the bank needed a decisive push to the cloud.
Keboola has massively kickstarted our cloud data journey; without it, we would probably be doing endless POCs without real business value.
With Keboola, Slovenská sporiteľňa completely changed the way teams look at data, not only moving the needle but unlocking new ways of working and collaborating. Not just a new data platform — new horizons.
Our data team is not only more efficient but much, much happier. They have more control over their worktime, can deal with more advanced data projects, and explore new technologies, because fighting fires doesn’t occupy 100% of their time anymore.