As India’s leading credit information bureau, CRIF High Mark Information Services serves the banking and lending industry with accurate, timely reports that define customer risk factors, trends based on geography, and other criteria. CRIF High Mark packages product data, geographical data, and demographic data as part of a subscription offering to clients. They deliver this data through dashboards shared on Tableau Server. Clients can analyze their own portfolios alongside information from the credit bureau data pool—allowing them to better understand their data and uncover business opportunities. In video 2, Rakesh Rallapalli, Practice Lead on the Business Analytics team, describes their success with Tableau’s mapping capabilities. Even with millions of address records, Rakesh’s team can create maps with just a few clicks in Tableau Desktop. In addition to traditional mapping, the team can also create complex heat maps in less than a day—a process that used to take up to a week.
Tableau: Why were you looking for a business intelligence tool? Rakesh Rallapalli, Practice Lead, Business Analytics: Data has become a commodity. We were looking out for ways where we could provide users with more intelligence on demand. Tableau: What kinds of data do you work with on a daily basis? Rakesh: We're talking about geographies. We're talking about product lines. We're talking about customer demographics. We're talking about publicly available data to enable non-traditional use cases of the credit bureau industry, such as the insurance sector and the telecom sector. Tableau: How do you deliver data to clients? Rakesh: We have packaged all of this onto one single platform, a pre-designed report, be it on-demand data from the bureau or interactive data discovery on dashboards; all of these we have been able to package onto a platform.
[Clients] get surprised and they sense, 'Oh, really, I can do that? I can figure out my own geography and filter and get the data out of the system and look at it on a heat map? Wow, that's brilliant.'
Tableau: How has Tableau benefitted your clients? Rakesh: We enable our clients to not only analyze their own portfolios, or their own data and information from the credit bureau data pool, but also perform benchmarking analysis, perform portfolio performance and quality kinds of reports. We offer this on a subscription based model to our clientele, and they can subscribe and utilize these services. And that is where the self-service kicks in. Tableau: What kinds of insights do your users extract from the data? Rakesh: Now if you had to provide all of this information at this grain, you are putting the ability into the hands of the end user to figure out the lending hotspots in the market, risk of concentration, whether their business is spread across a region correctly, whether they have their branch network cover all of this population. So these are the kind of insights that the users have been able to extract out of our systems. Tableau: How have clients reacted to Tableau? Rakesh: They even get surprised, and they sense, "Oh, really, I can do that? I can figure out my own geography and filter and get the data out of the system, look at it on a heat map? Wow, that's brilliant."
Better maps, in a fraction of the time
Tableau: How does your company use Tableau? Rakesh: We have been working with Tableau as one of the preferred platforms of choice for doing a lot of analytics, both in the form of geographical analysis as well as putting the power into the hands of the end users in the form of a self-service business discovery mode. Tableau: What challenges were you facing? Rakesh: In India we were facing a unique challenge in terms of the volume of the data that we are processing. So just to give you a perspective, we're talking about an address library of about 500 million records across India. Now a very important part of all of this is to be able to map the data onto geographies, demarcate them well, and map the data comprehensively. So we have been able to design dashboards that provide users information with over 40 million rows worth of aggregated data. Now put this into the context of geography and we are talking about 36 Indian states, more than 650 districts in India.
A heat map, which would take 40 man hours before Tableau, now takes us less than a day. That’s a reduction of almost 80 percent.
Tableau: Were you considering any other business intelligence solutions? Why did you choose Tableau? Rakesh: Since Tableau has the integration abilities with the open source web mapping software as well, that's one of the strengths of Tableau that we are leveraging. We were looking at the likes of QlikView from Qlik. We were also looking at MicroStrategy, and geo-analytics is one of CRIF High Mark's strengths in India. The entire seamless integration that Tableau offers in terms of geo-mapping capabilities is something that enticed us towards leveraging Tableau. Tableau: Are there any other Tableau features that are important to your company? Rakesh: Now we have been able to design this entire solution in a plug-and-play manner. Tomorrow it could be out of the Indian geography and in the geography of Hong Kong and the solution would still function well. Tableau: Can you share an example of how Tableau has saved you time? Rakesh: Though it's a little context based, just to give you a small example; a heat map, which would otherwise take 40 man hours before Tableau, right now, takes us less than a day. That's a reduction of almost 80 percent. Thanks to Tableau, we are looking at going to the next level in terms of geo-analytics as well as information intelligence in India.