Centralizing core banking data and reducing the time necessary to complete daily tasks by 83 percent

About the customer

Logix Federal Credit Union (Logix) is one of the largest credit unions in the United States (U.S.). Founded as the Lockheed Aircraft Employees Federal Credit Union in 1937, it has more than 800 employees spread throughout 17 branches. Overall, the credit union boasts approximately 250,000 members throughout the U.S. and is responsible for nearly $10 billion in assets.

Their challenge

Every day, Logix must extract, cleanse and join data from multiple systems and suppliers. The institution uses Jack Henry’s Symitar Episys platform as their core banking system.

The institution also processes debit card and automated teller machine (ATM) transactions with Velera (formerly Co-Op Solutions); manages its accounting with Multiview ERP; handles cash delivered and dispensed at ATMs with Sectran Security software and oversees service mortgages using Dovenmuehle. All these systems generate reports and control data critical to Logix’s profitability. Logix’s daily procedures require balancing all ATM transactions and recording journal entries to reflect ATM activity, debit card daily settlements, delinquent account analysis and more. The aforementioned systems generate data in a variety of formats; bringing everything together manually is impractical, time consuming and error prone. As such, Logix sought an automated data preparation and transformation solution that would provide insight into key performance indicators (KPIs) and allow them to quickly make decisions and identify problems.

Our solution

To meet their needs, Logix opted to use Rapidminer® Monarch™ software, which is part of the Rapidminer data analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) platform and the Siemens Xcelerator business platform of software, hardware and services.

Rapidminer Monarch is a comprehensive self-service data preparation software that converts disparate data formats into rows and columns for use in data analytics. It can extract data from virtually any source, including PDFs, complex spreadsheets, mainframe computers, structured query language (SQL) databases and more. Rapidminer Monarch is designed for users of all specialties and skill levels; it requires no specialized knowledge of database technology or coding to use it effectively. The software’s intuitive wizard-driven user interface includes over 80 prebuilt functions that make it easy to access, cleanse and transform unstructured and semistructured data into clean, usable datasets. “We reviewed available solutions, and only by using Rapidminer Monarch could we do the complex data transformations and extractions we needed in the targeted development timeframe,” says Sherry McCoy, assistant controller at Logix.

Results

Siemens Digital Industries Software’s Rapidminer Monarch experts worked with the Logix team to build three daily balancing journal entry models over the course of three one-hour meetings. These processes previously took more than an hour each day and required extensive manual effort. With Rapidminer Monarch, they completed these same workflows in less than 10 minutes a day – an 83 percent time reduction – with no need to worry about errors or manual work. Using Rapidminer Monarch also proved useful to Logix beyond journal balancing. After getting comfortable with Rapidminer Monarch, Logix employees were then able to access prebuilt models from the Rapidminer Monarch app library to handle other projects and needs. Today, Logix personnel use Rapidminer Monarch to access, cleanse and transform data from their Symitar Episys, Velera, Multiview ERP, UKG, Sectran Security and Dovenmuehle systems.

Overall, Rapidminer Monarch has made Logix’s daily operations more efficient, reduced error rates and improved visibility of profitability and operations. Best of all, leveraging Rapidminer Monarch has made Logix more effective and helps the credit union compete more effectively in the fast-moving world of finance and banking.

“Rapidminer Monarch is easy to use and is now a critical component that helps us make our daily operations more efficient,” says McCoy.