Daybreak is a Customer Data Platform Encompassing Ingestion to AI for an End-to-End Analytics Solution
As technology advances and AI and advanced analytics are becoming mainstream, consumers have grown to expect a more personalized experience from their bank or credit union. This is especially important for midsized community financial institutions as they rely on their white-glove service to compete against large national banks. Having a customer data platform that not only integrates, aggregates, and cleans customer-centric data, but also makes it easy to gather actionable insights using AI and machine learning is essential. Gartner reports that by 2024, 75% of organizations will have deployed multiple data hubs to drive mission-critical data and analytics sharing and governance. While this is a high priority initiative for many organizations, community banks and credit unions frequently don’t know where to start, or get stuck trying to piece together various tools to build a customer data and analytics solution on their own. Now, there is a better answer.
Daybreak is an end-to-end data and analytics solution, providing daily insights powered by a robust data platform, financial industry intelligence, and AI-powered insights. In the current market, it can be difficult for midsized financial institutions to hire the technical talent for complex data management and advanced analytics. Aunalytics provides clients with the right tools, resources, and support throughout our end-to-end process. The right foundation is essential for a successful AI, machine learning, and predictive analytics journey.
Watch the video below to see why an end-to-end customer data platform is the ideal solution for community banks and credit unions:
Daybreak allows community banks and credit unions to compete with large financial institutions by…
- Understanding customers,
- Optimizing processes, and
- Revealing actionable insights.
See how Daybreak Customer Intelligence for Financial Institutions is the customer data platform that makes it easier for community banks and credit unions to gain actionable insights and achieve positive business outcomes.
Proactive Security Measures Prevent and Mitigate Cybersecurity Attacks
Does your enterprise’s security stand up to today’s threats? Cyberattacks have increased to higher than ever levels and bad actors are attacking with increasing sophistication. It has been reported that ransomware attacks increased over 90% in 2021, with demands for payment skyrocketing into tens of millions of dollars. In addition, with remote work more prevalent than ever, most businesses now hold some form of sensitive data in the cloud and workers access company data from remote locations. Securing many different locations can be a challenge. Because of these factors, your security infrastructure in place today may still have gaps. Fortunately, proactive security prevents cyberattacks. Therefore, a security operations center (SOC) is the most essential element of modern security. But SOCs are expensive, complicated, and far beyond the reach of most small to midsize enterprises. Plus, security expertise is not easy to recruit and retain internally.
At Aunalytics, we constantly enhance our knowledge to keep up with progressively complex attacks. Aunalytics provides proactive measures for prevention, detection & response by identifying vulnerabilities and threats through a single, unified service. Our data platform examines intel from different sources with the goal of providing insight to your organization needed to best protect your technology environment. Pairing our data platform with the top cybersecurity solutions in the industry gives our clients peace of mind with our complete, holistic approach.
Watch the video below to learn more about Aunalytics Security solutions:
Since proactive security prevents cyberattacks, businesses need access to expert skills in cloud security and data security, which is not standard in mid-market IT departments. That is why our Aunalytics Advanced Security solution includes everything mid-market businesses need to manage risk, including:
- Comprehensive security operations solutions
- Customized security alerting and vulnerability prioritization
- Proprietary, cloud-based security platform
- Continuous vulnerability scanning
- Predictable, consistent pricing
- Threat intelligence and other security data
- Dedicated security engineers X 24×7 detection and response
When your business requires the highest level of security, Aunalytics has you covered. Our security experts stay up to date, so you can focus on your business.
Integrate & Wrangle Siloed Data into a Single Source of Truth with Aunsight Golden Record
Aunsight Golden Record™ gives your organization the ability to easily integrate and wrangle siloed data from disparate systems into a cleansed, single source of truth across your enterprise. Our cloud-native platform cleanses data to reduce errors. Golden Record as a Service matches and merges data together into a single source of accurate business information. As a result, you receive access to consistent, trusted data across your organization in real-time for better decision making.
With Aunsight Golden Record, you don’t need dedicated resources with deep technical knowledge of code writing, data mapping, and building data models to perform months of mapping projects or build custom APIs. Pre-built smart API plugins easily profile your data and connect your sources to the platform in minutes. With a large library of available plugins, Aunsight Golden Record integrates all of your data sources and third party sources. From data silos to clean, integrated data to golden records of accurate business information.
Watch the video below to learn more about Aunsight Golden Record:
Aunsight Golden Record includes features that automate tasks required to the integrate and wrangle siloed data:
- Data Integration: No custom code or glue code required to use our platform. We’ve done the heavy lifting—just configure and go. Powerful pre-built connectors enable seamless integrations in minutes.
- Data Mapping: Auto-map to all your data sources. No more gruesome mapping projects to move your data. Find the data you are looking for quickly and easily with automatic schema discovery.
- Data Quality: Automated data quality checks, cross system comparisons and data quality notifications help you set and enforce data quality standards. Use data profiling results to set quality checks based upon expected values, ranges and anomalies.
- Data Matching & Merging: Automate de-duplication and relationship discovery of data across all your systems using fuzzy matching algorithms and ML on individual data fields. Combine data in motion in real-time from multiple sources to build and maintain a Golden Record that can be trusted.
- Data Governance: Data flow events are automatically retained and captured to show you where data came from and where it goes—changes made to your data over time are tracked in our audit trail timeline. Build a data catalog or dictionary as a foundation for governance.
- Data Delivery: Replicate your Golden Records of accurate business information forward to data warehouses, data lakes, dashboards or reporting applications. Our bidirectional sync allows you to write the accurate information back to source systems so that your entire organization operates off of the same information.
Our solution provides technology and automation of data integration and wrangling, so you can focus on achieving business outcomes. Click here to learn more about Aunsight Golden Record.
Predictive Customer Insights Drive Positive Business Outcomes for Community Banks and Credit Unions
Daybreak™ Customer Intelligence for Financial Institutions uses data from across your enterprise to reveal actionable, predictive customer insights. As a community bank or credit union, you know that providing white glove service is your competitive differentiator. The ability to anticipate needs not only leads to happy customers and members, but also leads to increases in revenue and reduced costs. But in order to make accurate predictions, you need access to the right data.
We know that transactional data tells a story…if you can interpret it. Reports from banking cores only show you the past. You need to be proactive—predictive customer insights enhance your white glove services so you can compete with larger financial institutions. We also know that smaller financial institutions usually don’t have the technical talent for advanced analytics, machine learning, and AI, or don’t know where to start to become data-driven. As a result, they do not achieve value from technology investments.
At Aunalytics, we believe that it takes the right combination of people and technology to achieve value. Daybreak gives you access to a team of technical experts paired with an end-to-end data platform. Instead of trying to piece together tools and technologies, we build and maintain the solution for you.
Watch the video below to learn more about the benefits of Daybreak’s predictive customer insights:
With Daybreak’s customer intelligence insights, you can:
- anticipate customer and member needs by offering the best product at the right time,
- grow relationships by winning business when your customers have products with competitors,
- reduce risk by predicting likelihood of loan default at the time of application, and recognize who is at risk for crypto-fraud, and more.
Daybreak provides an end-to-end solution, including both technology and expertise, so you can focus on business outcomes. Click here to learn more about the Daybreak solution.
Credit Union Realizes Immediate High Value Impact with Daybreak Advanced Data Analytics Platform
Communication Federal Credit Union (CFCU), a $1.7 billion credit union with more than 23 branches in Oklahoma and Kansas, was seeking a data analytics platform that would drive immediate high value impact for their organization. Having data was never an issue for CFCU as the organization had always had volumes of information to work with. However, it was scattered across the organization, messy, disjointed, and very difficult to bring together. As the credit union started to adopt analytics and become more data driven, it had to quickly learn how to leverage data within technology platforms to fulfill senior management’s requests for strategic information. CFCU initially engaged with a provider that ultimately fell short of what the credit union needed. Unfortunately, that solution required a lot of time and effort from the business intelligence team to wrangle the data from multiple systems and manually compile and consolidate it. In addition, the reporting system turned out to be proprietary, limited, and lacking creativity. Because of this, the team decided to replace its existing provider with a new one.
Having experienced an unsuccessful partnership, CFCU now had concrete goals and a higher set of expectations for what it required of a data analytics provider. After researching and vetting many vendors, CFCU choose Aunalytics and its Daybreak™ Advanced Data Analytics Platform. Aunalytics offered a side-by-side partnership model that integrates technology and expertise in one end-to-end solution built for non-technical business users. Aunalytics was also flexible, open, agile, and offered an unmatched level of support.
By implementing Daybreak for Financial Services, the credit union realized immediate high value impact in centralized automated data cleansing, organizing, structuring, consolidating, and aggregating. The credit union was able to gain and leverage daily cleansed data, delivered seamlessly in a dynamic environment without the investment in required cloud infrastructure, software, and people such as data engineers, data scientists, and day to day support. To learn more about how CFCU leverages this data to accomplish high effort projects at greater speed and efficiency download the full case study.
Ransomware Attacks Now Target Community Businesses
If you think that your business will not be a target for ransomware attackers, think again. This is no longer a problem only for large enterprises—now, ransomware attacks target community businesses as well.
The Battle Creek, Michigan community woke up to a May Day attack that forced its Kellogg Community College (KCC) to close all operations. In the middle of preparations for final exams, all five campuses serving approximately 6900 students closed and all operations came to a screaming halt.
The community college posted alerts on its website and social media:
Eric Greene, the Vice President for Strategy, Relations, and Communications at KCC said: “We are still working to understand the full extent of this incident, but as soon as we became aware of it, we immediately assembled a multi-disciplinary team and engaged independent legal counsel and external forensic experts.”
Greene continued, “KCC had backups in place, and we are working systematically with our IT experts to restore our operations.” But even though KCC had backups, “As a precautionary measure, all campuses have been disconnected and our systems will remain offline until they are deemed secure by our IT experts. As a result, our students and staff might experience delays accessing our services, including campus emails, online classes, and resources,” Greene said.
Back-ups alone are not sufficient to prevent business disruption when a ransomware attack hits. Preventing the attack, rather than having to respond to it, is key. KCC remained closed for three days while IT scrambled. All computer access to university systems had to be shut down in an attempt to stop further damage. The response and mitigation included a forced password reset for all students, faculty and staff, and adding multi-factor authentication (MFA) for all users.
Enable Multi-factor Authentication
MFA is an important security measure when people access systems remotely. It provides an extra level of verification to make sure that the user attempting to access the system is really an authorized user and not a bad actor trying to get in. Modern business regularly includes employees logging in from home, travel and mobile devices to access data and systems from their organization. As such, the old firewall security perimeter around your place of business does not protect you. Modern security requires focus on users and access. MFA is something that is easy to add to your security stack. The protection benefit from MFA far outweighs the resource cost of installing and using the technology. Really, there is no excuse for not having MFA in today’s threat landscape. It is standard.
So if you do nothing else this year to improve your security posture, add MFA. But considering that community businesses are becoming targets for cybercrimes, unless you can afford a complete shut-down of your business, it is becoming a must to have modern security technologies (including robust monitoring so that you are equipped to prevent attacks and are better positioned to respond and mitigate), in addition to back-up and disaster recovery plans.
Shift Applications to the Cloud
Mid-market businesses are shifting security and data center responsibilities from on premise servers and security maintained by their IT department, to partnering with cloud experts who run data centers, keeping client systems stable and secure as their full time business. The trend with line of business applications used by your team for daily operations is cloud. As more and more community businesses use cloud based apps for functions like accounting, customer portals, ERP, CRM and HR, having cloud experts with the tools and the skills to be able to secure your organization’s data (from multiple sources) for safe use by remote users makes more sense than trying to build a security fortress yourself at your place of business.
Partner with Experts
If cybersecurity is not your main line of business, partner with security experts unless you want cybersecurity to become your main line of business. It will consume your resources to stay current with emerging threats, protective means, 24/7/365 monitoring, best practices and constantly evolving security measures. The ever increasing sophistication and volume of attacks has shifted the answer to the “buy it or build it” question for this critical business service from the solution being your in-house IT department to the solution requiring managed security services to supplement your in-house IT team.
Don’t become the next ransomware attack headline. Community businesses can take steps to avoid ransomware attacks. An ounce of prevention, after all, is less costly than the cost of operational shut-down, PR scramble, customer service disruption, brand reputation tarnishment, and emergency security consultant fees paid when you are in the middle of an attack that succeeded.
Women’s Ability to Adapt and Persevere Leads to Success in the Tech Industry
By Katie Horvath, CMO, Aunalytics
As a woman who has spent the majority of my career in the tech industry, I am acutely aware of the importance of diverse representation. Historically, women have had to persevere through adversity and quickly adapt to change—skills needed to succeed in the tech industry. I have witnessed firsthand the importance of women’s contributions to the overall success of a tech organization. So when I received an email from McKinsey in my inbox today, I was happy to see this topic addressed. McKinsey reported that:
[C]ompanies across industries are boosting their efforts to increase the representation of women by focusing primarily on two targets: hiring them into entry-level roles and establishing parity in the C-suite. But our research has found that many organizations are missing the mark at a key moment: equitable advance in early promotion. Across all industries and roles, only 86 women are promoted to manager for every 100 men at the same level. In technical roles—specifically, engineering and product management—just 52 women are promoted to manager for every 100 men. As a result, women are leaving these technical fields in high numbers.
This inspired me to compare my experience with various tech companies across my career, spanning from the late 1990’s in Silicon Valley, to Redmond in the mid 2000’s, with work locations during my career on the East Coast and in the Midwest. While you might think that things are more conservative in “fly over land” of the Midwest—giving women in tech fewer opportunities than on the coasts—the horror stories of the “bro code” culture in the San Francisco Bay Area have dominated in more recent years and lack of support for women founders to find funding both on the west and east coasts is of high concern.
As CEO of a Midwest big data software company, I did not experience gender discrimination when it came to seeking funding from Midwest investors. We even completed our exit strategy in the middle of a global pandemic—acquisition by strategic investor, and today I am a C-suite executive at that strategic investor, leading high-tech in the Midwest. Out of my many experiences (and trust me, I’ve experienced the “good old boys club” and more), I truly believe that having women in leadership at the top is a key component of creating inclusive company culture. With women in roles empowered to build and create company culture, and hiring practices that include seeking men and women for front line roles, new hire roles (straight out of school), management, and executive roles, it breeds for inclusion at all ranks. Really, you need to work at all levels for people to see and believe that a workplace is “female friendly.” And then it builds upon itself. Women who want to work with other women in tech are attracted to the employer.
Key to this is having visible authentic leadership where team members can see women making personnel decisions, such as promotions into leadership roles for midlevel management. If the perception is that the “good old boys” are making career advancement decisions and company strategy decisions, then women are tokenized. Rather, to be equitably led by both men and women, the team needs to see both men and women empowered with this decision-making.
McKinsey reports that:
[E]ven today women earn about half of science and engineering degrees, but they comprise less than 20 percent of the people working in these fields—and the ones who do pursue this career path can often be the only person of their gender in a room. Without a doubt, retaining women in technical roles is crucial for organizations to reach gender parity not just at the top but also throughout the entire workforce. That cannot happen, however, if companies do not retain and advance women in tech roles—and see them as innovators—early in their careers. The task is not simple. It will require management commitment, as well as a systemic approach that includes equitable access to skill building, a structured process that debiases promotions, and a strong culture of support for women.
As with past years, this year, Aunalytics promoted many from the inside into leadership roles, and I am proud to look around and see women in numbers. Not just tokens, but women in numbers from entry level engineers, product and technical services managers, directors, vice presidents, and our C-suite is 50% woman led. I do not advocate for hiring a women just for the sake of diversity, but rather hiring the best person for the position. The fact that we have established a culture that attracts the best in the business, including the best women, is humbling. It’s the goal. You want to attract the best talent and hope that this opens doors for your company to benefit from diverse ideas, experiences, and opinions. This is what makes your products and services stronger. After all, if everyone came to the table with the same idea, creativity would be lacking and R&D stagnant.
At Aunalytics, we are in the business of data, including building AI to provide insights-as-a-service for industry applications, such as customer intelligence for financial services. McKinsey smartly points out that diverse teams can help de-bias the technologies that are ever-present and ever-expanding elements of modern life. Artificial intelligence, for example, has tremendous potential to help humans make fair and impartial choices, but only if the AI systems themselves are not embedded with human and societal biases. For our AI-powered financial services product, both women and men are leading roadmap decisions, driving development team velocity, managing sprints for delivery of new features, developing go to market strategies for new features, and leading our client success teams. Though our goal did not begin with making our AI diverse and inclusive, it is a great impact of the diverse team that we have assembled.
I have long been an advocate for encouraging girls into careers in math and science based upon finding career opportunity and success going down this path myself. We know that higher paid jobs continue to dwell in technology. For women, automation presents not only a myriad of opportunities, but also new challenges. Business is digitally transforming to the next age of technology and it is important for women to keep up. A smart worker looking for career advancement will embrace change and seek out job retraining programs, learning new skills and technologies such as those supporting business intelligence and automation. History has proven the resilience of women to persevere through hardship and adversity, multitask for efficiency, and quickly adapt to change. These exact skills are a recipe for success in business in the digitally transforming world. For women taking intentional steps to learn new technologies to drive business processes, leadership opportunity abounds.
Oil & Gas Company Achieves Total Data Management Solution with EnerHub Powered by Aunsight Golden Record
Any business in an industry with large amounts of data knows that properly managing data across the entire organization can be a colossal, if not nearly impossible, task. That is why many choose to implement a third-party data management solution to streamline the process of integration, cleansing, and governance.
One oil & gas company faced a huge data problem impacting business operations: inconsistent data in common well attributes across multiple operational systems. To solve this challenge, the company had previously selected a Master Data Management (MDM) tool from a well-known oil and gas software vendor.
However, once up and running, the company soon realized that the software complicated and actually worked cross-purpose to its business processes instead of streamlining data. They experienced labor-intensive data maintenance, lack of summary-level views of the data, and a poor overall user experience.
Less than a year after their original MDM implementation, the oil & gas operator decided to cut its losses and find a solution that aligned with its original vision: an easy-to-use, “super-intuitive” tool with the flexibility to adapt to its culture, workflows, and user needs. The company spent nearly a year evaluating and comparing data management tools and selected EnerHub™️ Powered by Aunsight™️ Golden Record.
“Aunalytics technology exposes and remediates issues caused by siloed and inconsistent data that otherwise would cost an oil & gas company millions of dollars annually in lost productivity and missed opportunities,” says William Cummings, Vice President of EnerHub at Stonebridge Consulting. “With Aunalytics technology, Stonebridge quickly and easily builds and manages specialized well production data models and EnerHub customers find the technology easy-to-use.”
By implementing EnerHub Powered by Aunsight Golden Record, the oil & gas company now has the total data management solution they originally envisioned. Learn about the benefits of the Aunsight Golden Record technology by downloading the full case study.
Analytics Database Platform Powers Customer Insights and Positive Outcomes for Community Bank
Horizon Bank, a midsized community bank with branches across Indiana and Michigan, sought to implement an analytics database platform that would help them make better use of the copious amounts of CRM data they possessed, but had not been able to use to its full potential. Horizon had installed several customer relationship management (CRM) systems over the years that fell short of meeting the organization’s objectives due to a data infrastructure that wasn’t conducive for robust customer relationship management. As a result, the bank made the strategic decision to develop a custom in-house CRM solution and selected the Daybreak™ for Financial Services analytics database platform to enable seamless data integration and utilization of that data for customer relationship management to further strategic business intelligence goals.
Data experts at Aunalytics took a three-pronged approach to solve Horizon Bank’s business challenges using the Daybreak for Financial Services analytics database platform. The first move was to get the data right by converging disparate repositories, and organizing the information for ingestion in the proper application area. Horizon Bank leverages Daybreak’s robust, cloud-native platform to convert data into answers in support of a wide range of business intelligence applications. Daybreak allows Horizon’s executives to view system-wide data from all business units, cleansing and verifying records to provide enriched data for accurate, data-driven decision making. The aggregated data delivers a 360-degree view of customer information including behavioral data, from which the platform’s proprietary AI technology and deep learning models developed by Aunalytics data scientists glean actionable customer intelligence insights.
Deploying the Daybreak analytics platform has taken Horizon Bank and its 74 locations to the next level of services and support for customers, making it the preferred financial partner with compelling advantages over larger, competitive establishments. Learn more about the challenges Horizon faced to implement a data analytics platform, and how Daybreak helped them overcome those challenges by downloading the full case study.
Managed IT Services and Data Recovery Offerings from Aunalytics Solve Emergency IT Challenges for EMI
Over the past several years, information technology has taken center stage at Ohio-based landscaping company Environmental Management Inc. (EMI). Established more than two decades ago, EMI has grown to be one of the largest landscape companies in Central Ohio. Serving major business and governmental customers throughout the region, EMI continues to grow, thereby increasing demand for managed IT services in multiple business areas.
Managing business-critical IT environments is a time-consuming process that many times can require specialists with the experience to deliver the highest performing infrastructure possible. EMI has seen this first-hand over the past several years as the company has had to recover from destroyed network infrastructure caused by a catastrophic lightning strike, a disruptive cyberattack involving ransomware with the encryption of important company information, and the need to reconfigure its computing endpoints quickly because of the occurrence of Covid-19 to accommodate “work from home” environments for its team.
Aunalytics provides a broad range of managed IT solutions, including network, server management, and PC management, as well as Office 365, data recovery and business continuity support. EMI employed several services which have helped to positively transform the company’s operations.
The side-by-side support model employed by Aunalytics has been an especially impactful benefit of this partnership. “While there are many important services provided, perhaps the most widely used and important for EMI is the 24×7 help desk which is essentially an IT department on demand,” said Tom Kiefer, CFO for EMI. “Whether it’s an employee who accidentally deleted a file or a catastrophic lightning strike, the team behind the Aunalytics Ohio help desk has been insightful and fast to act, allowing our employees to remain online and productive.”
Read the full case study to see how EMI further benefitted from the managed IT and data recovery services provided by Aunalytics Ohio.
