KB Kookmin Bank leads data culture with Tableau

KB Kookmin Bank (KB) is an acknowledged leader in Korean finance, managing the largest domestic customer base with the highest market share in assets and investment trusts. KB’s focus on customers has long supported its outstanding performance and helped cement its reputation as a trustworthy brand ranked top in the banking sector in National Customer Satisfaction Index (NCSI) for the thirteenth year running in 2019. Data plays a critical role in enabling KB to respond to the urgent changes sweeping the finance industry.

KB has become a leader of data culture in the first-tier banking sector by implementing visualization-based self-service BI and expanding it across the whole organization. Against the backdrop of rising internal demands for utilizing data in the business area including financial customers and service improvements, KB introduced and expanded Tableau so that business employees without IT knowledge can perform data analysis and derive substantial insight.

After adopting Tableau, KB implemented an enterprise-wide data-driven decision-making system, which is an essential element of supporting a data culture. Employees are now able to make decisions through Tableau based on data-based facts, rather than personal experience or intuition. This meets the needs for data and analysis critical for business operation, while also helping to get people engaged in discussions based on actual performance data and to challenge new ideas. What’s more, it supports risk management by automatically adjusting analysis targets according to the changing market conditions and readily available data analysis. Tableau automates the reporting work and enables all employees to create reports at the speed of their thoughts and share them, thus accelerating growth and improvement.

The importance of data and analysis to innovation in Korean finance is increasing daily rapidly. KB has successfully created an industry-leading data culture. That is, it adopted Tableau and expanded it across the organization so that the employees in all business departments of the main office can use increasingly complex data to make decisions on their own and drive business growth. As a result, it has accelerated its data journey and secured competitiveness.

Before the adoption of Tableau, all employees in business departments used to depend on the IT department to extract and analyze data and develop reports. In addition, extensive SQL training requirements slowed down analysis in the field, impacting data utilization. Furthermore, as the existing BI system was highly dependent on IT, it had limitations in quickly meeting the needs of employees in the field.

KB, which implemented the big data platform in June 2018, adopted Tableau on a small scale and expanded it in December 2018. As a result, business employees can now readily use Tableau, whereas before they would have needed to first gain professional-level skills in data analysis.

In 2018 PLAN-iT, a Korean Gold Tableau Partner took charge of the big data platform establishment at KB and made success case of implementing self-service BI in the first-tier banking industry. In the process of this project, the business employees of KB received support from PLAN-iT. They experienced developing reports that meet their need for analysis information. In other words, the bank’s analysis proficiency improved across its workforce.

After the adoption of Tableau, KB employees became able to use data as strategic assets and make data-driven decisions. Employees in business departments now use Tableau to connect to heterogeneous data marts, easily extract the data they need and derive insight through intuitive, detailed visualization functions at the speed of thought. Business employees readily share their Tableau dashboards with bosses and executives.

The lack of resources before the adoption of Tableau impeded data analysis. Now, business employees use Tableau to validate new ideas with data.

KB has expanded its use of Tableau in a top-down style under the powerful leadership of its executive team to transition into a data-driven organization. It has expanded the scope of Tableau utilization from the Data Planning Department to all departments of the main office and its local branches. In other words, distinct to KB, more employees use Tableau in all business departments. Plus, its main office and nationwide branch network share the common goal of improving business with data, while the main office shares performance analysis results with branches so that they can check them in real-time.

Lee Min-hye, head of the Data Planning Department of KB, said with emphasis, “KB is leading the data culture by adopting Tableau, the visualization-based self-service BI platform, across all our branches nationwide. Executives and managers are now able to prioritize data using Tableau when making decisions. Tableau pushes the boundary of experience in the finance industry, where data has a close connection with innovation.”

Lee Yeong-Seon, Data Planning Department, KB, said, “Tableau has further expanded our data culture across the organization, and it is helping employees to have more impact on influencing others with data. This is shown in community activities, data visualization lab researches and the wide distribution of best practice.”

To respond better to changing trends in the financial industry, the business employees of KB wanted to do their work based on objective data. The executives of KB needed to encourage all employees to improve their data literacy to lead financial innovation.

They firstly had to adjust their business priorities according to changes in market conditions, and then derive highly executable insight by attempting new analysis projects.

Tableau is a self-service BI platform that supports quick decision-making based on accurate data. Regardless of department, Tableau provides all employees with data analysis opportunities, e.g. number of customers, counsel, accounts/products and regional performance.

Business employees actively use Tableau to seize new growth opportunities and manage potential risks. A typical use case is making, updating and sharing dashboards on current business situation and management agenda, contributing to expand customer base. Tableau also helped considerably in enabling a rapid response across the enterprise to ensure resiliency with data-driven decisions to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Executives are practising data-driven decision-making. They are checking real-time changes in Key Performance Indicators (KPI) and management status data in the dashboard and reflecting them in their business plans.

A KB official said, “Tableau helps us stay flexible in our decisions by getting everyone on the same page quickly on data that are highly valuable. When we carry out new businesses, we expect that we will be able to make a judgment using existing performance data. Also, we look forward to creating a working environment that verifies performance with data.”

Employees of departments in the headquarter are supporting each other’s business while sharing product analysis results through Tableau. While once only those departments which led customer and marketing analysis using the analysis results, now they can get new ideas based on the reports of other departments, which were shared on the integrated analysis platform implemented with Tableau. A KB official said, “Each department makes more efficient decisions while preventing duplicate analysis through the Tableau platform.”

KB had to spend a significant amount of time in complicated and repetitive manual work from data query, extraction, cleansing and analysis to report development for regular reporting task. In a given time, they could make only a paper report, and also there was a limitation in report formats that they can produce. Also, they could not put the results of the exploratory analysis conducted from new perspectives in a report.

Through the Tableau-based automated self-service reporting process, employees of all departments of KB were able to improve their business productivity significantly. Tableau automatically queries, extracts, analyzes, and updates data on behalf of business employees to conduct reporting work. As a result, the bank was able to substantially reduce the time required for repetitive report development and editing.

Through the Tableau-based automated reporting system, KB now has the resources and capacity it needs for monitoring work to take place on a monthly basis, rather than quarterly, as used to be the case. That data is now updated daily and the time required for report development and implementation reduced from a few weeks to 2~3 days, enhancing business efficiency significantly.

Tableau has helped reduce the time spent on reporting by 10,000 hours a year and enabled employees to concentrate more on strategic and critical work.

Through Tableau, the business employees now access and analyze data and find answers at the speed of thought, and make analysis results into a report, in compliance with their data utilization and reporting requirements. They are overcoming the restrictions of existing report formats, conducting various analyses, and carrying out in-depth analysis on any insights they gained. What’s more, to solve current business problems, employees now feel empowered to take on visualization projects, improving business efficiency by generating differentiated insights.

The executives and business employees utilize all reporting contents in real-time through various kinds of dashboards shared on the mobile and web, including key performance data, the results of analyzing key indexes for individual departments and other visual analysis results. Tableau gives employees more opportunities to discuss reporting contents anytime and anywhere.

A KB official said, “Through the convenient reporting process built on Tableau, we reinforced the agile decision-making system.”

PLAN-iT Partners provides a total BI service from the initial stages of defining the indicator tree to designing BI platform and developing BI system. We are skilled experts with BI development experience of more than 10 years from global consulting firms which helps companies enhance BI performance and achievement. The team is also equipped with IT expertise to provide internal solutions such as Big data search engine and cloud-based tax solution. Through broad and successful work experience mainly with enterprise clients in various industry, PLAN-iT delivers successful Agile BI(Self-service BI) platform and high BI value.