Bank Mandiri embeds a data-driven culture where every decision will be based on reliable data with Tableau

As the largest financial institution in Indonesia, Bank Mandiri is committed to being attentive, proactive and innovative in providing the best solutions to its customers. This commitment is strongly seen as Bank Mandiri implements a culture of data optimisation, where each decision of every department will be made using data analytics. The bank’s partnership with Tableau supports this by helping to improve data analytics skills among employees and by making data more accessible. The partnership has so far proved beneficial, as Bank Mandiri‘s Enterprise Data Management (EDM) Group collaborates with Tableau to lead the development of the bank’s analytics capability. This group has successfully accelerated the dissemination of information from two weeks to two days in some cases and is defining new standards for data quality, governance and accessibility.

In the past, information requests were sent to headquarters which needed two weeks to run an SQL query and gather information from different systems. They then prepared a report in spreadsheet format and sent this out by email. Bank Mandiri, however, wanted a faster and easier way to analyse information and to provide more secure access to those who need it. The EDM Group is helping to deliver this and is now able to provide requested information in a more timely manner. What’s more, the information provided is not just a plain and as requested report but comes with thorough and up-to-date insights to helps make better and faster decisions. The bank is strictly supervised by the financial regulators to guarantee customers’ information privacy, and this privacy is always prioritised and protected. The partnership with Tableau contributes to privacy by creating data governance. To support this, the bank is also planning to launch a new data governance unit as well as a data committee.

The EDM Group has worked with Tableau to develop more than 600 dashboards and visualisations. One of these is a dashboard for monitoring debtors daily transactions, as well as supporting better decision making on new and renewal loan disbursement. Another dashboard is used to show customer behaviour and transaction characteristics, helping the bank to make analysis on the success of marketing campaigns and to determine the best strategy for future ones. A third dashboard is used to provide descriptive analytics to inform cross-selling recommendations. The EDM Group has also increased the speed of responding to ad-hoc requests and is able to provide various groups with secure access to visualisations in Tableau rather than sending data out in spreadsheets. The group is now expanding on these projects with an increased focus on embedding its data to all groups of the bank, including Distribution Strategy which supervises branch networks across the country. “Every decision we take must be based on data, whether those decisions are made at a C-level or within a branch. It is also important that everyone has access to the same data so that there will be no dispute about the facts. This is what we are currently working on,” Setiawan added.

Within the EDM Group, there are at least four roles required for data and analytics: a data engineer, a data governance officer, a business analyst and a data scientist. There are development plans for each role and they will have access to the curriculum from Mandiri University. As this team grows, they will lead user groups and empower others across the bank to become more data-driven. As an example, the EDM Group has started to enable non-EDM users with data analytics capability by organizing data & analytics course programmes. The programmes have been running since January 2020 and include participants from various divisions who can gain fundamental knowledge about data and learn how to produce visual analytics by using Tableau. To engage the participants, the EDM Group has created a community called Mandiri Tableau User Group (MTUG) which meets monthly and also provides coaching for Tableau users who have problems with data, analytics and visualisation. The coaches are volunteers from the EDM Group who can show their colleagues how to prepare future analysis and visualisation reports. Angga Pratama from Consumer Credit Risk and Analytics is one of the 571 employees using Tableau and said, “By creating good visualisations through Tableau, management can easily produce good analysis as well, helping the bank to make better decisions.”