Hastee Pay redefines the short-term finance market with help from Tableau on AWS

Founded in 2017, Hastee Pay is the UK’s first technology solution that allows employees to receive their pay as soon as they have earned it, rather than having to wait until payday. The app-based solution has no cost or impact on company cash-flow, meaning employers benefit from increased productivity, punctuality, and staff retention, while workers can access their pay wherever and whenever they need to. The team behind Hastee Pay uses Tableau to analyze in-app behavior in real-time and deliver clear, actionable intelligence back to employers. Tableau has also cut Hastee Pay’s analysis time from days to seconds. And with Tableau Cloud on Amazon Web Services, Hastee Pay has added flexibility of the cloud, avoiding significant up-front infrastructure costs.

Personal finance is a highly emotive market where speed and accuracy of information are paramount.

“When you’re dealing with other people’s money, there’s no margin for error,” says Peter Ingram, CTO of Hastee Pay. “The ability to produce fast, effective business intelligence (BI) is playing a pivotal role in the company’s success.”

When Peter joined Hastee Pay in December 2017, it was using a combination of Microsoft Power BI and spreadsheet analysis. However, this solution was proving too costly and clunky, meaning one of Peter’s first tasks was finding a more suitable alternative.

“We reviewed several leading analytics and reporting platforms, but quickly settled on Tableau due to its data accuracy, highly visual presentation and real-time intelligence capabilities,” says Peter.

With Tableau in place, the company can achieve a wide range of BI goals quickly and efficiently, ranging from in-app user behavior analytics to financial reporting for its client.

“Using Tableau, we can keep our clients updated in real-time on key information such as how much money workers are withdrawing, when they are withdrawing it and how frequently,” says Peter. “This kind of information is hugely valuable for their financial planning and our ability to provide it instantly through Tableau gives us a big competitive advantage.”

Hastee Pay is also able to clearly demonstrate the ROI of its service to clients using Tableau analysis.

“In nearly every company where our solution has been introduced, worker attendance and punctuality has increased significantly,” explains Peter. “This is because employers can choose not to make pay for a shift immediately available to a worker if they are more than a certain number of minutes late for it. Tableau analysis of in-app data shows that as a result, around 70 percent of workers now arrive early for every shift, to ensure instant access to their pay at the end.”

Hastee Pay is a fully digital business, hosted on Amazon Web Services. As such, it was imperative that any intelligence solution used was compatible with this business model.

“We knew that going 100% cloud would give us the flexibility we wanted, without incurring significant up-front infrastructure costs,” says Peter. “Tableau Cloud fits into this business model perfectly, allowing us to feed information from our five AWS repositories directly into the platform and instantly start benefiting from the insights yielded.”

As a banking grade app, data security and integrity are also extremely important to Hastee Pay. Solutions must offer the highest levels of protection before they can even be considered.

“Tableau’s enterprise-level security features, such as multi-factor authentication, provide the protection that we need as a business,” says Peter. “Furthermore, we could deploy and configure the entire solution within a matter of days, making the whole process fast and painless, with no downtime incurred.”

Before Tableau, internal data was hard to reach and interpret, making time to insight unacceptably slow.

“Across many areas of the business, reporting and analysis were being done manually in Excel, which was time consuming and left many spreadsheets out of date,” says Peter. “Switching to Tableau has changed all this, with insights that previously took days to uncover now available in seconds.”

One area that Peter highlights is the website and its use of AI bots.

“We use AI bots on our website to capture all incoming customer requests for support,” explains Peter. “We then analyze this information to see if there are particular recurring issues, so we can design them out of the solution in future.”

“In the past, this could be a laborious process, involving combing through many lines of spreadsheet data by hand. Now, this task is automated in Tableau, saving many hours, or even days of manual analysis. Any recurring issues with the solution are quickly identified via a single Tableau dashboard, saving the data team a huge amount of time that can now be spent on more important activities.”

As a recent startup, the team at Hastee Pay is small, but growing rapidly. Efficient operation requires all members of the team, from the executives through to sales and marketing, to operate autonomously, without relying on others to get jobs done.

“Before Tableau, data analysis was one of the main hang-ups within the team,” says Peter. “With only two dedicated data guys, they were slowly becoming a bottleneck on productivity because everyone else was reliant on them to produce insights on behalf of the whole company.”

“Tableau has changed all this. Its intuitive UI and visual approach means that with minimal training, everyone can control of their own data output and can quickly build reports to suit their needs,” concludes Peter. “They can interrogate data and make decisions based on accurate insights without relying on others, streamlining operations and greatly improving overall business performance.”