Reducing the time it takes to process 600-page financial service reports from hours to minutes

About the customer

Kohler Credit Union is a $615 million not-for-profit financial cooperative that’s owned and governed by its members. Founded in 1938, Kohler Credit Union serves Wisconsin residents with a range of retail financial services for consumers and businesses, including home mortgages, auto loans, savings and checking accounts and credit cards. The institution makes extensive use of Fiserv products, including Fiserv DNA, Fiserv Prologue, Fiserv Optis and others, to support its operations. Fiserv provides the processing infrastructure required to handle deposits, credit cards and loan operations, including payments and billing, mobile banking, merchant account processing and more.

Their challenge

Kohler Credit Union is a long-time Fiserv customer and planned to migrate from the Fiserv DataSafe account processing platform to Fiserv DNA, a newer platform with improved retail and commercial functionality. The new platform would enable the credit union to offer a wide range of additional account services to its members. The institution needed a way to make this business-critical migration smooth and efficient.

Fiserv DataSafe and Fiserv DNA core systems both generate over 300 reports every day, and these reports contain data that’s critical for banking operations. Unfortunately, accessing these reports’ data isn’t easy because of their semi-structured format.

For example, the credit union’s audit and compliance team must review Fiserv deposit reports, which list every activity each member has made, to identify certain activities. Trolling through 600 pages in a typical report makes this critical process difficult and time consuming.

Our solution

While the Kohler team was searching for a solution, a Fiserv account representative recommended Rapidminer® Monarch™ software, which is part of the Siemens Xcelerator business platform of software, hardware and services. The credit union purchased a single license to support reconciliation of automated clearing house (ACH) and accounting side procedures as a test of the Rapidminer Monarch capabilities.

Once they began using Rapidminer Monarch, Kohler discovered the extensive library of prebuilt Rapidminer Monarch models available in the Siemens user portal, including many models for Fiserv DNA, Optis, Prologue, EFT and more. The Kohler team investigated the model library further and discovered that Siemens offers a growing list of prebuilt and tested models that instantly addressed about 80 percent of Kohler’s business requirements. As new requirements arise, their users can open Rapidminer Monarch, download the models they need, load the Fiserv data and immediately begin doing the important work of analyzing the information instead of spending hours preparing the data for analysis.

After discovering the depth and range of functions in the Rapidminer Monarch model library, the credit union made the decision to invest in Rapidminer Monarch Server, which allowed them to automate multiple processes.

“Rapidminer Monarch is a game changer in our world and has helped us by leaps and bounds. It is very powerful in taking in any data and analyzing and comparing it,” Matt Fehrmann, chief information officer (CIO), Kohler Credit Union.

Kohler Credit Union uses Rapidminer Monarch Server to automatically ingest, process, and distribute reports generated by their Fiserv DNA account processing platform. The software can connect directly to text, PDF, CSV, Microsoft® Excel®, JSON, XML, and HTML files, SQL, DB2, and other databases, and big data sources including AWS, Cloudera, and Cassandra. It supports API integrations, includes a comprehensive data catalog for models and workspaces, enables scheduling and monitoring of critical workflows, and exports to flat files, SQL databases, and other formats.

Results

With Rapidminer Monarch Server workflows, the Kohler team has benefitted from outstanding results that have significantly reduced the time and headache previously associated with deposit reports. Now, the 600-page reports that previously took more than 2 hours per day to process are now tackled by Rapidminer Monarch Server workflows in mere minutes. This enables the Kohler audit and compliance team to focus on exceptions and saves many staff hours every week. The institution’s compliance and audit teams now receive the information they need automatically and in formats that are easy to understand and analyze. Finally, the Kohler team also used Rapidminer Monarch to manage their migration from Fiserv DataSafe to Fiserv DNA, which saved the information technology (IT) team many staff hours during the project and ensured the migration was completed on time.

“Compared to what we did before, we now just take the hundreds of server reports dumped on our network every night and put them through various Rapidminer Monarch workflows, which deliver exactly what our end users are after,” says Fehrmann.

“The Siemens team has been fantastic in helping us build the data preparation and transformation processes we need to automate our critical workflows, saving us many hours every week. We keep coming up with new requirements as well and add new use cases frequently.”