SANTA ANA, Calif. - The key to good decision making and risk management is having good data, and Schools First FCU here has that in spades.
The $7.7-billion CU is using a digital dashboard that delivers "what if" scenarios, based on handpicked combinations of monthly data such as line of business, FICO band, county, loan amount and loan status, according to David Hanighen, VP-IT planning and development at Schools First.
The dashboard is fed by a business intelligence and data warehousing environment, supported by Microsoft SQL Server and Microsoft Office PerformancePoint, SharePoint and Excel, said Hanighen.
"PerformancePoint is one of our newest tools and is being used heavily in support of dashboard reporting and analytics due to the financial crisis," he said. "It has proven to be particularly valuable in support of what-if analysis and modeling for credit risk management."
PerformancePoint provides dashboards, scorecards, reporting, analytics, planning, budgeting and forecasting features. For SchoolsFirst, PerformancePoint is a step beyond ProClarity, the analytics engine Microsoft acquired in 2006 that the credit union has used for more than three years. The resulting union is "powerful," said Hanighen.
"ProClarity would have been adequate during this crisis, but PerformancePoint's integration with SharePoint and ProClarity makes it possible for us to provide better analytics and dashboards," he explained. "ProClarity was limited in the controls and displays you could use in creating dashboard reporting."
Senior management is already using the dashboard to gauge monthly trends in mortgage, auto and credit card loans under various lenses, Hanighen said. "They can review the amounts and number of loans funded or in the pipeline, and then view them by location, FICO score, or line of business. They can choose to see any combination of those criteria.
"For example, we can see how we're doing by FICO band in Orange County," he said. "Are our FICO scores going up or down over time? Are they higher or lower in mortgage? In credit card? In auto? How does that affect the line of business?"
Add "extensive" delinquency reporting to the mix, including views of 30-60-and 90-day status based on location, line of business, and FICO, and SchoolsFirst is "beginning to understand Performance Point's true power," said Hanighen.
That's quite a leap from ProClarity, he continued. "With our old credit risk management tools, we produced a lot of trending reports that didn't give us the opportunity to choose the combination of criteria."
SchoolsFirst changed all that as it built its PerformancePoint models, said Hanighen. "We now have the opportunity to select data in a multitude of ways called dimensions. It's a very powerful tool to do what-if scenarios in support of our finance department."
Beyond performance management, SchoolsFirst has begun to run separate statistical software for loss analysis modeling, Hanighen added. "We take the same data that we feed into the dashboard and model it at an even more granular level to see how recent events impact our portfolios."
Whereas PerformancePoint pulls monthly data from the SQL warehouse, several auxiliary systems that feed the warehouse have the capability to deliver daily data, he said. "We just haven't implemented the ability to pull more current data yet."
SchoolsFirst has run PerformancePoint in development mode for one year, said Hanighen. "We're adding the final revisions before we place our credit risk management dashboard into production."
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For info on this story:
www.schoolsfirstfcu.org
www.microsoft.com
