How FNBO revolutionized partner reporting with Amazon QuickSight

This is a guest post written by Indranil Saha and Tom Rubenstein from FNBO.

FNBO (First National Bank of Omaha), founded in 1857, is one of the largest privately held banks in the US. Our institution manages over $31 billion in assets and employs more than 4,500 people. FNBO offers a comprehensive range of financial services, including corporate banking, investment banking, retail banking, wealth management, and consumer lending. We serve a diverse clientele, from individual consumers to large corporations.

In this post, we explain how our partnership reporting and analytics team collaborated with our enterprise data management team and IT to harness the power of Amazon QuickSight. This initiative transformed our new era of insights, streamlined our processes, and provided enhanced value to both our partners and internal stakeholders. We detail how we implemented QuickSight across various departments, the challenges we overcame, and the significant improvements we’ve seen in our data analytics and reporting efficiency.

The challenge: Scaling partner reporting

As the fifteenth largest credit card issuer in the US, FNBO has a significant presence in the credit card lending market, maintaining partnerships with more than 90 entities that offer FNBO credit cards. Our partnership reporting and analytics team is responsible for managing both internal and external analytics and reporting for our partnership line of business. This includes oversight of credit card portfolios and other unsecured loan portfolios.

Prior to adopting QuickSight, our partner reporting solution was a custom, homegrown system that used SharePoint to distribute mainly Excel-based reports. These reports were generated by running Statistical Analysis System (SAS) on a scheduled basis on an on-premises server. As our partner reporting suite expanded over time, several challenges emerged.

Lack of standardization was a concern. Many reports weren’t fully standardized, resulting in similar but slightly different reporting formats for various partners. In most cases, the reports produced for Partner A were distinct pieces of code from those produced for Partner B, despite their similarities.

This absence of standardization led to noteworthy challenges in maintaining the code base. Implementing changes to a standard report required distinct code modifications for each partner receiving that report. The limited interactivity of Excel reports, which relied on pivot tables and slicers, further complicated matters.

Due to these restrictions, we had to use locally run macros that couldn’t be scheduled on a server. This required human involvement every morning to refresh the pivot tables, impeding full automation. As the number of partners and reports grew, the custom solution became increasingly difficult to manage and scale efficiently.

These challenges collectively highlighted the need for a more robust, standardized, and automated reporting solution.

Choosing QuickSight

After a comprehensive evaluation of several business intelligence (BI) tools, including existing in-house solutions and other market-leading options, we determined that QuickSight best met our unique combination of needs. The top three reasons for choosing QuickSight were:

• Secure and straightforward integration with Snowflake – The majority of our dashboards are sourced from our Snowflake data warehouse, which is hosted on AWS. QuickSight offers seamless integration with AWS services, including the ability to connect using AWS PrivateLink, which was a key factor in our decision. Additionally, the SPICE dataset feature provides us with the option to store data, enabling partners and viewers to load and view dashboards without delays. These SPICE datasets also refresh automatically on a schedule, which alleviates one of the challenges we previously faced with manual refresh of pivot tables.
• Robust row- and object-level security and APIs – We needed a product that supports both row- and object-level security, allowing access to single dashboard for multiple partners while making sure each partner only sees their own data. QuickSight offers powerful APIs, enabling us to automate user access and permissions, reducing manual IT work. Furthermore, we can move dashboards and analyses between environments, streamlining our development process.
• Advanced features for future use cases – Compared to our other on-premises products, QuickSight offers ample options, including embedded dashboards, pixel-perfect reports, and Amazon Q in QuickSight. Though not immediately necessary, these capabilities will eventually be needed for various future use cases in our bank.

The integration capabilities, security features, and scalability of QuickSight aligned perfectly with our technical requirements, business needs, and long-term strategic goals for our reporting and analytics capabilities.

Implementing QuickSight: A 6-month journey

The deployment of QuickSight was a comprehensive 6-month process, largely due to the extensive consolidation and streamlining of our existing reporting systems. We began by cataloging all existing reports, which revealed hundreds of external Excel-based reports that needed to be condensed into dozens of QuickSight-based dashboards. This involved a complete review of current reporting practices and a thorough reconciliation of duplicative reports, a time-consuming but necessary step to maintain the efficiency and effectiveness of our new system.

Our partner QuickSight reporting reference architecture illustrates how we integrated QuickSight into our existing systems.

Partners access reports and dashboards through a portal, authenticating through single sign-on (SSO). We offer standard dashboards that cater to common metrics across all partners. Thanks to the robust row-level security of QuickSight, each partner sees only their relevant data, providing confidentiality while maintaining consistency. For partners with specific needs, we have built tailored solutions dive deep into partner-specific metrics and KPIs, providing targeted insights.

Access controls are managed through a table within Snowflake, with partner user information managed in an on-premises SQL database. This data is refreshed to our Snowflake enterprise account daily and shared with our partner Snowflake account. We then convert the data into a QuickSight specific format for use in row-level security datasets.

We also implemented an automated migration solution for QuickSight assets. This allows our business users to migrate various objects (datasets, dashboards) to production without IT involvement. The process is managed through various folders in the preproduction environment, with a migration utility running at regular intervals to stage asset codes in an Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket. QuickSight bundles APIs, which provides extensive capabilities to automate and accelerate assets deployment

Transforming partner reporting with QuickSight

QuickSight has enabled our reporting and analytics team to achieve significant improvements in efficiency and scalability. We consolidated approximately 600 discrete pieces of reporting objects into about 60 modern interactive dashboards, providing the same—and in many cases more—information than the previous reporting system.

One of our key dashboards showcases portfolio live accounts by state, providing partners with a clear geographical view of their customer base. This visual representation, shown in the following screenshot, allows for quick insights into regional trends and performance. The dashboard allows users to dig into the status of banking product portfolios, evaluating their performance, size, and geographical distributions.

Another crucial dashboard presents spend charts by month, enabling partners to track spending patterns over time. This dashboard, shown in the following screenshot, allows users to deep dive into the types of transactions that are made across our banking products to look for trends, patterns, and volumes.

We’ve also created comprehensive insights dashboards that include metrics such as debit active by age of accounts, spend by age of account, competitive spend, and recency. These dashboards, shown in the following screenshot, provide partners with a holistic view of their portfolio’s performance and customer behavior.

By using row-level security, we can now create multi-purpose dashboards that multiple external partners can use, with each partner seeing only their relevant data. This approach has significantly simplified maintenance, because enhancements can be deployed to all relevant partners simultaneously.

The increased flexibility allows us to cater to specific partner needs without duplicating efforts. If an external partner requires a unique layout, it can often be built on top of the existing data without coding a new dataset.

Realizing the benefits of QuickSight

The adoption of QuickSight has led to numerous benefits for FNBO and our partners:

• Improved reliability – The pre-QuickSight process was somewhat unreliable, with scheduling system problems occurring at times. This issue is now almost non-existent, freeing up considerable time previously spent on maintaining and adjusting disparate code.
• Enhanced performance – QuickSight results are more performant, creating a better experience for our external partners. The reduction in manual interventions and improved reliability have allowed the team to focus on more value-added activities. We’ve seen three-to-four times development improvement from a report development perspective. From the end-user perspective, they were viewing an Excel dashboard previously vs. a QuickSight dashboard, which is more streamlined in design. We monitor dashboarding loading stats and other metrics using an Amazon CloudWatch QuickSight dashboard, which allows us to take necessary action if any particular dashboard shows slowness in loading or other issues. We’ve received positive feedback from end-users, so never need to go back and compare performance between Excel vs. the current solution.
• Efficient user management – We now automatically manage over 90,000 users and more than 100 groups seamlessly with row-level security enabled. Development and object management have been simplified, reducing development cycle time and maintenance overhead.
• Reduced latency – Data is precompiled, resulting in less latency while accessing data from the dashboards. Additionally, we can track usage of various dashboards, allowing us to make informed decisions on which reports are most valuable to our partners.
• Cost optimization – By automating QuickSight administration and enabling business users to manage reports without IT involvement, we’ve significantly reduced IT overhead costs. The cloud-based nature of QuickSight allows us to scale our BI capabilities without the need for additional on-premises infrastructure investments. QuickSight decreased the amount of time spent updating our reporting by more than 75% by moving to a modern cloud-based solution. This allowed the team to focus more effort on improving and enhancing reporting solutions, rather than updating and refreshing existing reports with more recent data.
• Increased BI adoption – The ease of use and accessibility of QuickSight, especially through our partner portal integration, has led to increased adoption of BI tools across our partner network and internal teams. We’ve implemented a CloudWatch QuickSight usage dashboard that provides valuable insights into dashboard utilization, allowing us to optimize our BI resources and make sure they remain relevant and valuable to our users.

Looking ahead: Future plans with QuickSight

As we continue to take advantage of the capabilities of QuickSight, we have several initiatives planned:

• Dashboard embedding – For some of our most frequently used dashboards, we’re planning to embed them directly into the partners’ login page, which will streamline their access to vital information.
• Expanding use cases – We’re exploring options to enhance dashboard functionality, allowing partners and end-users to perform exploratory analysis rather than simply viewing static dashboards. This shift aims to provide more interactive and dynamic data exploration capabilities.
• Internal adoption – We have started using QuickSight for our internal business reporting, gradually replacing our current legacy reporting tools. This transition is expected to modernize our internal data visualization and analysis processes.

Conclusion

The adoption of QuickSight has transformed FNBO’s partner reporting capabilities, enabling us to provide more value to our partners while significantly improving our internal processes. By taking advantage of the robust features of QuickSight, including row-level security and comprehensive APIs, we have created a scalable, efficient, and secure reporting solution that meets the complex needs of our diverse partner network.

As we continue to expand our use of QuickSight, we look forward to further innovations in our reporting and analytics capabilities, ultimately driving greater value for our partners and reinforcing FNBO’s position as a leader in the credit card industry.

To learn more about how QuickSight can help your business, visit Amazon QuickSight. Try a free trial of QuickSight today.

About the Authors

Indranil Saha is a Solution Architect – Data at FNBO, boasting nearly 18 years of experience in BI, data engineering, ML, and data architecture across diverse industries. For over 3 years, he has been spearheading various data initiatives at the bank, collaborating closely with data engineering and analytics/ML teams on projects encompassing BI, ELT, reporting, analytics, and ML. Indranil is passionate about crafting innovative solutions and simplifying complex architectures. His expertise extends across multiple cloud platforms, and he has successfully led migrations from legacy systems to modern, cloud-centered solutions. As a lifelong learner, Indranil is dedicated to exploring new tools and technologies, ensuring he remains at the forefront of the rapidly evolving data landscape.

Tom Rubenstein is the Manager of the Partnership Analytics and Reporting Team at FNBO, where he has spent the last 9 years of his career. Prior to that, he has worked in data analytics and consumer research roles at multiple organizations, after a stint driving submarines in the US Navy. He has a passion for packaging data in a way that can help drive decision-making and make business challenges easier to understand.