A Capco and Pyramid Analytics shared vision

Financial institutions are always looking for ways to improve their operations, increase efficiency, and reduce risks in the fast-changing world of financial technology. Despite ongoing efforts to modernize and centralize enterprise technology, financial institutions (FI) struggle to address the persistent challenges of their end-user computing (EUC) technology. 

Large FIs may have backlogs of hundreds of legacy EUCs – a broad label that refers to pieces of technology created by business users, for business users – that stand apart from traditional technology processes and platforms.

While EUCs offer unparalleled flexibility and user control, they come with their own set of challenges, ranging from transparency issues to regulatory scrutiny, and the costs associated with them can be significant.

How can FIs tackle thorny EUC remediation without resorting to the same basic strategies? Let’s look at how a fresh approach to remediation could revolutionize the way financial institutions handle EUCs.

The pros and cons of EUCs

Ask a financial analyst about the overdue enhancements from IT to their monthly reporting tool, and the benefits of EUCs become clear: user management (allowing direct user control of data), greater flexibility (giving access to a centralized network of applications), and increased accessibility (enabling quick deployment of solutions in a rapidly shifting industry).

Conversely, ask a risk officer about the challenges they face, and the cons of EUCs are just as clear: lack of transparency (creating risk of fraud, including shadow IT), increased regulatory scrutiny (requiring extra data compliance processes), and high costs (adding to ongoing operational expenses).

EUCs are embedded within lines of business everywhere, from finance, retail banking, wealth management, capital markets, insurance, HR, operations, and technology. Moreover, EUCs can be small yet impart outsized influence. Imagine a one-tab calculator tool built in Excel as part of a multi-stage, multi-platform financial reconciliation process: one erroneous formula, untested before being put into production, might cause a ripple effect that disrupts numerous downstream workflow steps.

The remediation approach for EUCs

When considering remediation for your EUCs, a common approach involves:

• Consolidating data across multiple data sources using a data preparation tool
  
• cleansing and transforming it
  
• displaying it as a dashboard or report using a visualization tool. 

This approach requires multiple (and different) governance standards and various stakeholders to enable the end solution. What is more, consumers of the data can still download the dashboard or report, thus inadvertently creating a new EUC and perpetuating this troubling culture.

Pyramid Analytics: a game-changer in EUC remediation

Existing remediation approaches and tools offer predictable – and limited – solutions. However, Capco’s collaboration with market disruptors and technology innovators such as Pyramid Analytics promises a fresh approach. 

With Pyramid Analytics, EUC remediation is streamlined, reducing complexity and enhancing data security. Pyramid Analytics combines business analytics, data prep, and data science in one unified platform that is governed, secure, AI-enabled, performant, and can unlock new opportunities.

Here’s what EUC remediation looks like with Pyramid Analytics: 

• Reduced data propagation by directly querying data sources in a unified, governed, and controlled platform that enables the creation of traceable and governed assets
  
• Simplified complex workflows and tools and governance standards
  
• Enhanced data security and understanding of how individuals within the organization are using data
  
• Accelerated future EUC audits
  
• Finally, new measures can be implemented to prevent consumers from downloading data due to in-built traceability.

Pyramid Analytics empowers business users to drive the development of the technology they rely on, but do so with proper governance, management, and ownership of data – all of which are critical when remediating EUCs. The benefits are even clearer: effective EUC remediation streamlines operations, reduces costs, and minimizes risk. Moreover, EUC remediation enables clear and traceable data lineage for regulatory reporting, effective data cataloguing, data literacy upskilling, and more well-defined data ownership and security parameters.

Introducing Tabulate: the solution to EUC challenges

One especially powerful offering from Pyramid Analytics is Tabulate. Designed for business modeling, Tabulate allows users to create enhanced models using a familiar spreadsheet interface. It resolves the ‘pragmatic’ last-mile analytics challenges many businesses face and prevents the continued spread of EUCs. 

Tabulate delivers capabilities that operate with live data through query mashups, multi-query visualizations, flexible formatting, and a library of Excel-like functions to create business models. These models can be embedded in presentations or shared on interactive dashboards and in formatted reports without sharing the entire spreadsheet, its data and/or logic. 

Users can make quantitative predictions based on underlying business assumptions using the spreadsheet-like interface. Analysts can build business models to create forecasts, projections, simulations, scenarios, trade-offs, and other analyses to help businesses improve performance, meet goals, and make decisions.

Users can hydrate models with live data wherever it resides – such as SAP BW, AWS Redshift, Snowflake, Microsoft Synapse, or Pyramid’s in-memory engine. And this content is dynamically embeddable in a live ‘Present’ dashboard and sharable via report bursting from the ‘Publish’ app. Apart from stemming the spreadsheet epidemic, end users no longer need to plow through it to surface the analysis buried inside it.

In the most recent release, Pyramid added the ability to drive infographics and dynamic text from Tabulate. This enables easier, faster sharing of insights and visualizations from composite queries and lowers the barrier for non-technical users.

Tabulate Lite: simplified business modeling for all

With Tabulate Lite, Pyramid Analytics makes sophisticated modeling accessible for less technical users, providing a simplified approach to using the Tabulate business modeling functionality inside the Pyramid platform. It offers the same powerful functions as the full Tabulate feature but is delivered in a streamlined interface for ease of use by businesspeople and non-technical users. It is perfect for completing quick analyses. And it allows users to perform recurrent tasks using the most common functions readily.

Next steps

As we have explored, the landscape of EUC in financial institutions is vast and varied, with both advantages and pitfalls. However, with the right tools and partners, institutions can navigate this terrain effectively and mitigate undesirable consequences. Remember, EUC remediation is a journey, not a destination, and Capco and Pyramid Analytics can be your partners wherever you are on this journey. Reach out to us anytime to see how we can help you unlock your company’s full potential.