FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla.—Noting many data analytics efforts within organizations fail more than they succeed—and cost more money than expected—Tom Davis urged credit unions to consider partnerships to advance their moves into Big Data.
“Gartner research shows that 60% of data analytics endeavors, for all industry categories, fail,” said Davis, president and CEO of Trellance, during the CUSO’s Immersion 19 meeting here. “Also, 70% of all data analytics efforts cost more than you thought before you went into them.”
Davis said with that backdrop, as well as the battle to leverage consumer data heating up, data analytics is getting very competitive and will become much more competitive in the future.
“Less than 50% of all data analytics efforts we undertake will be successful, so we know credit unions need help here,” said Davis.
Why Move Was Made
In part, a recognition of that pattern that sparked the move by Trellance to divest CSCU, the CUSO's payments processing business, in late 2017, noted Davis.
“We knew back in 2016 these problems existed and we knew where we needed to put our efforts to help credit unions be successful,” he explained. “We have been thinking about this problem for a long time. We know that if you try to do this journey on your own, the odds are you will fail and go over budget.”
Trellance has made two acquisitions in the last seven months that Davis said now allow the CUSO to deliver even more comprehensive support to credit unions.
“It's basically the concept of being there for credit unions for the whole data analytics journey—from start to finish,” said Davis.
Two Acquisitions
In February 2019, the company acquired the data analytics CUSO OnApproach. In 2018, it bought IronSafe, a software and data analytics firm.
“IronSafe built a really great product that allows credit unions to basically get data out of systems that they normally couldn't get data out of,” explained Davis. “So, if you can print a report for any system, we can take that data and turn that into a SQL table or Excel spreadsheet. We can pump that into either data visualization tools or a data warehouse.”
Three Service Models
Davis said Trellance offers three service models: self-service, managed services, and professional services.
“We are very different team than we were 18 months ago when we had 19 employees,” said Davis. “Today, with our contractors, we have 102 employees and we are growing. And we are not done yet—there may be other companies joining the Trellance team. Everyone at Trellance has one goal in mind, to help credit unions transform their data into actionable insights.
“We don’t have to look at data as closely as Amazon, but we do need to look at our members’ data,” concluded Davis. “Amazon is the case study that shows the power of data analytics and we need to learn from them.”
Davis termed the months since the company divested its payments business have been a busy, but “great ride.”
“It’s been a good decision to pivot,” he said. “We have gone through a lot of change in just one year, and we are not done yet.”