Investec is an international banking and wealth management group. It was founded in South Africa in 1974 and entered the UK in 1992. The company provides a range of financial products and services to a client base in Europe, Southern Africa, and Asia-Pacific.

The company is planning a global data warehouse modernisation initiative with WhereScape at its core. This case study tells the story of how Investec adopted WhereScape for a specific use case, and rolled it out in a company-wide strategy.

Challenge

Investec aims to move from opportunistic BI to a long-term vision based on a consistent, fully-documented framework. The company is preparing all its data for an eventual move to Microsoft’s cloud data warehousing platform, so everything the data team does now must be portable to the Cloud. The company also wants to switch to Data Vault 2.0 modelling for greater agility and a global view of its data ecosystem.

Solution

The Investec team invited two WhereScape Senior Solutions Architects to its office for a proof of concept, and presented four use cases that should have taken four to six weeks to solve. The data modelling work was to be completed on two host applications, a customer information system and a rewards system, with structured and semi-structured data. The Investec team made sure they didn’t tell WhereScape architects much about how to piece the two applications together.

Results

Investec’s data acquisition project has accelerated noticeably since the team onboarded WhereScape. The repetitive hand coding work is now automated, enabling the staff to focus on more enjoyable tasks in areas where they can add most value.