Castle Trust Bank|Financial services
Working with Castle Trust Bank to transform its data solutions and implement lasting change
When Castle Trust Bank approached Coeo, it had a clear plan in mind. Understanding data is vital to its success, but its existing technology was holding it back. And rather than making piecemeal changes, it saw the most value in a complete refresh.
Summary
Objective
Castle Trust felt its data capabilities were holding it back. Coeo’s task was to modernise the bank’s business intelligence solution, working collaboratively with Castle Trust’s data team to help make a step change in the company’s data culture.
Solution
- Microsoft Power BI
- Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics
- Microsoft Azure Data Lake
- Databricks (SQL, Python)
Results
- Faster insight through highly responsive data visualisations and models
- A flexible, scalable, modern data architecture
- Efficiency through automation
- A more secure and controlled platform
- Greater staff engagement
- A growing data culture
Castle Trust Bank is a fintech and newly authorised bank. Its mission is to disrupt the UK market, offering flexible and innovative lending solutions for both the point-of-sale and specialist mortgage market. As part of the bank’s growth strategy, Castle Trust is investing in a modern and modular platform that enables both automation and innovation.
Over the past year, as part of its investment strategy, Castle Trust Bank has implemented a leading-edge data platform and capability.
Learning & understanding
Deciding to invest in data capability
“We’re an ambitious and growth focused lender. A central part of our growth plan is ensuring that we have the requisite data capabilities and maturity. From experience, we knew establishing a strong data foundation was crucial to Castle Trust’s success,” says Nick Bennett, Chief Technology and Operations Officer at Castle Trust Bank.
Roger Jones, the company’s Head of Data, recalls, “We felt that we didn’t have the right long-term technology solution in place, which was limiting our potential data maturity, so we decided to replace it entirely rather than make incremental changes.”
Implementation
Partnering with Coeo
“ We recognised that we needed external expertise to execute our vision. In that respect, Coeo stood out clearly as the right partner.” Roger Jones, Head of Data, Castle Trust Bank.
“We liked their modern, modular vision, their depth of resources and experience, their focus on data and their Microsoft Gold Partner status.”
Coeo helped Castle Trust to select Microsoft’s Azure Synapse Analytics Platform, utilising Databricks as the framework for the transformation layer, and Power BI as the presentation layer. Castle Trust benefited from Coeo’s accelerator tool, Velox, which sets up the environments quickly and consistently, providing simple metadata-driven tooling to allow the bank’s data team to integrate new data sources, implement changes and build new models quickly.
Coeo also provided consultancy to support Castle Trust’s model designs, with the bank using the standard Kimball methodology to design its data models. “I really valued Coeo’s guidance and consultancy to help us design the data models required,” says Roger. “They clearly had a lot of expertise in that area, which helped us to make the correct early decisions.”
The build phase was collaborative, with Castle Trust performing the modelling, and Coeo carrying out the development. “We developed the model structures, and then I would interact via Teams with Coeo’s data engineers to review what they had built. Even though the work was done remotely – it felt really interactive.”
For Jamie Cronk, Senior Client Manager at Coeo, collaboration was key to the success of the project. “It’s been fantastic working with Castle Trust. Their data team was keen to be fully involved in the project, which allowed Coeo to become an extension of the team. This excellent collaboration has resulted in a successful project and a long-lasting partnership.”
Outcomes
A growing data culture
The solution is already delivering benefits across multiple use cases in various areas of the bank. It’s allowing users across the business to deliver new insights and other new data requirements quickly.
“Our data team is starting to create a whole new data culture in the organisation. It’s great to see the beginning of our transformation into becoming a data[1]led organisation”, adds Roger. “We are now seeing our internal customers becoming more demanding, challenging us more. These are great early signs of a change in the way our teams use data.”
Castle Trust also expects benefits in terms of staff engagement, improved process controls, improved data protection, as well as efficiencies through the automation of routine tasks.
Opportunity to innovate
“We love it that we are now able to make changes quickly, that our data solution is enabling new opportunities, new ways of working, and new ways of thinking. I’m really excited about the impact that this is going to have on our business over the coming years“ Roger concludes.
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