JPMorgan Chase chooses Tableau to enable self-service analytics, keeping up with rapid industry changes

JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPMC), is a leading global financial services firm and one of the largest U.S. banks. The company has grown through mergers and acquisitions with data becoming vital to business operations and strategy—reducing risk, enhancing the customer experience, and offering intelligence to shape future strategy.

JPMC made a shift from IT-owned to business-owned self-service analytics to keep up with rapid industry changes and better optimize for business success. But in a highly-regulated environment, IT needed to first establish enterprise governance that balanced data access and compliance. Championed by the Center of Excellence and with IT as enablers, JPMC adopted Tableau, expanding from 400 Tableau Server users in 2011 and approaching 30,000 today—driving enterprise-wide data accuracy.

Today, over 500 teams use Tableau to make strategic decisions that are important to the bank’s health. For example, JPMC’s Marketing Operations team analyzes the customer journey, which influences design decisions for the website, promotional materials, and products like the Chase mobile application. Finance and Branch Managers analyze data to support a stronger customer banking experience. And a variety of roles—from Traders, Operations Analysts, Sales, or Risk and Compliance team members—benefit from Tableau’s API capabilities, which support a seamless analytics experience with existing business applications.

Business groups wanted to feel empowered to solve problems and answer questions of their own data, while adhering to financial services industry compliance and regulations, along with internal data governance standards.

For a long time, the business relied on legacy tools like Excel and SQL Server. However, this ecosystem created inefficiencies and replication of data, resulting in confusion and inaccuracies. With business intelligence solutions like Cognos or Business Objects, it also took months to assess campaigns for effectiveness. A platform balancing IT governance and data access, but addressing business priorities with immediacy, was needed.

With new team leadership, IT removed data barriers for business groups and worked with Compliance, Audit, and Risk to develop a governance solution using Tableau. “I would rather create a platform that allows the business to solve their own problems, because we (IT) will never know them all. That’s how I’ve approached our Tableau usage, simply because it allows them to connect to and analyze their own data, which they were already doing,” explained Steven Hittle, Vice President and BI Innovation Leader.

Providing Tableau access when people had the desire to try something new, JPMC enabled governed self-service at enterprise scale. The Center of Excellence (COE) team played an important role with adoption and continues to set the vision for Tableau and analytics use across JPMC. Eight individuals trained 1,200 new developers and analysts on the platform throughout all of 2017, creating grassroots momentum and sparking interest that’s led to nearly 30,000 current users. With the COE’s help to motivate and train users with classroom learning and Tableau Days (a full-day session with Tableau sales and bank staff collaborating on Tableau), steady wins occurred and created a positive, virtuous cycle of data analytics.

“I think that’s been the biggest contributor to Tableau’s success at JPMC...it evolved from nothing to where we are today because people want to use it, and not because IT went off in a bubble,” reinforced Jason Mack, Director of Analytics. The bank has 18 Tableau Server clusters where they monitor usage, performance, and key metrics to make sure everyone is satisfied, there is sufficient data capacity and efficiencies are realized.

By allowing analysts across business teams to question data with Tableau, JPMC has also reduced manual reporting time from months to weeks, which saved thousands of hours and created better enterprise-wide decision-making with elevated transparency. Analysts to C-level executives have gained more time and access to think about data’s impact on the business, have more capacity to innovate and have set more consistent definition of metrics to better understand the journey that customers take with the bank.

While business teams reviewed analytics (e.g., measuring account-specific data and retail data), they struggled with viewing the whole customer and their end-to-end journey. Tableau now acts as the front-end for customer analytics and Marketing has built robust data sets tying the line of business relationships like products, marketing, and service touch points with customer data to evaluate overall customer relationship worth.

“We put a Tableau front-end on our robust customer data sets that enable analysts to quickly ask questions like ‘how many customers have a Freedom and a checking account and use the mobile wallet,’” explained Jason. This arms JPMC with insights to improve customer satisfaction while growing its customer base.

When launching campaigns, the Marketing team analyzes population data in Tableau to determine optimal targeting. And the operations side looks at customer journey analytics to understand process breaks. It’s important to see why and where customers abandon an action with the bank or where there are key volumes on channels so product improvements can be made. “There are call center metrics. There are website analytics. Everything you can think of from a customer experience where we’re trying to improve customer satisfaction,” added Steven. The outcome is quick wins versus putting items on a roadmap to eventually be addressed.

Marketing also supports JPMC’s retail branches with Tableau dashboards to better understand their market. For instance, certain dashboards help better prospect small businesses. And they’re delivering greater detail on home sales and realtor activity to inform select programs and customer targeting. There’s now a piloted rollout of Tableau to branch staff such as Private Client Bankers and Home Lending Advisors that will eventually include all 5,300+ branches.

When the 2012 economic crisis triggered industry upheaval, focus shifted to increased controls for banks. This tighter regulation strained the relationship, collaboration, and trust between IT and Business. By not having transparent and full trust with line of business data, the cost and risk to JPMC grew, but showing compliance with government regulations was required. The bank’s risk analysis had been done in bulk with Excel, Access, and other tools. This made it difficult to ensure accuracy of the data source and adherence to regulations. To shift this pattern, IT brought along stakeholders from Risk and Compliance to gain support and further spread Tableau.

IT trained them on Tableau and data models to foster a healthier, collaborative working relationship. This eventually opened up Tableau for hundreds of Risk users’ benefit with the right governance framework in place. The team uses Tableau Desktop or Tableau Cloud to create dashboards with controlled, compliant data that’s served up on Tableau Server to business teams, managers and executives.

In support of the effort, IT created a new cluster called certified self-service, which goes through a more rigorous process to ensure the SQL is correct, and that people are confident the data is authoritative. It’s made up of 18 Tableau Server clusters with 90 distinct sites. With certified self-service, everything is documented with a data dictionary, so on-the-fly decisions can be made knowing it’s a trusted source. IT verifies the data is performing and it meets security control guidelines.

“Allowing self-service in one of the most highly regulated spaces – having the standard platform, the right data controls and the right governance in the tool that captures meta data and provides lineage of it in Tableau – users love it because they don’t have to wait for IT and IT loves it because they have happy users,” stated Sriram Belur, Head of Business Intelligence Delivery Center.