Tableau Drives Operations Performance for Financial Firms
Customer Profile
National Financial Partners (NYSE:NFP) is a national network of independent financial advisors consisting of over 165 owned and more than 210 affiliated firms in 41 states and Puerto Rico, specializing in life insurance and wealth transfer, corporate and executive benefits, and financial planning and investment advisory.
Customer Case Description
NFP’s Field Technology Department is responsible for supporting Operations and Accounting. This includes collecting and analyzing key business data related to policy case processing by its insurance carriers.
The Operations Department’s key challenge was to monitor and analyze policy processing response rates for over 1,000 open cases. They needed to measure and report the performance of its insurance carriers in order to drive improved operational efficiencies and increase customer satisfaction. The Accounting Department’s key challenge was to process thousands of commission payments to its brokers. Its primary focus was to identify anomalies based on expected values and historical data.
NFP was seeking an effective front-end application for data analysis and reporting. Compatibility with Microsoft SQL Server and Excel was critical. PowerPoint integration was also required due to the number of presentations that are given to company executives and to its insurance carriers.
The primary evaluation criteria for the application were: (1) it had to be visual and easy to learn, (2) it had to be deployable without servers, IT consultants, and a long implementation cycle, and (3) it had to snap into the existing IT infrastructure.
Using Tableau, I am able to quickly drill down into large sets of data and find relationships that would have taken 10X as long with traditional query tools.
The Solution
NFP selected Tableau Professional. “Using Tableau, I am able to quickly drill down into large sets of data and find relationships that would have taken 10x as long with traditional query tools,” said Brandon Nichols, Assistant VP Firm Technology.
Tableau allows National Financial Partners to connect to data in Excel, Access, and SQL Server. Tableau’s “visual analysis” enables case administrators to find the important trends, relationships, and outliers in large quantities of data quickly and effectively.