Swansea Q&A We recently caught up with Chris Wright, Application Delivery Lead, to find out how the Society are getting on with CXFINANCE two years after implementation.

Name – Chris Wright Job title – Application Delivery Lead Bio – Founded in 1923 Building Society provides its members Number of staff - 53 with loans secured on residential properties and a wide variety of savings accounts. Operating predominantly in the South area, the Society Number of core users – 4 prides itself on the personal and tailored service it provides to its

Branches – 4 branches, 1 head office members and the work it does within the community to fundraise and promote local charities. Date of implementation – September 2016

Q. To kick things off could you please provide us with some background information about the Society and why you chose CXFINANCE?

A. At present there are four of us who work directly with CXFINANCE, two of us primarily produce the reports for the Society, while the two other team members head up reporting from the Finance point of view.

The key driver behind the decision by the Society to procure CXFINANCE was the desire to move away from what was a fragmented reporting setup. There existed an assortment of report generating software, including SQL, SSRS and Crystal reports. The aspiration was to bring CXFINANCE online to integrate all the reports the Society holds to produce a single centralised view. We still have some way to go but we are making good progress.

Q. Can you explain how you are currently using CXFINANCE?

A. A large part of my role is to work with departments within the Society to find out what reports are currently in use, what they want their reports to tell them and what new reports they require. Our transition to CXFINANCE is not always about reproducing the existing reports like for like, but producing reports within CXFINANCE that provide actionable and valuable insight.

Historically, changing or providing new reports to business users would have required IT staff to manually write or rewrite a report, which for a small team was exceptionally time consuming; this could sometimes take up a whole day.

Q. Earlier you talked about now having access to a single view of your data. What systems are included in this single view?

A. We use CXFINANCE to report directly from our core banking software SOPRA, which links to our Oracle database and pulls together information regarding our members, accounts and financial information. We also link to our SAGE accounting software which holds payroll and accounting information, and our SOPRA till systems which provide us with information regarding transactions and much more. This data is live and providing us with a real time insight.

I recently carried out a project which sees CXFINANCE monitoring our databases. It identifies space within our Oracle databases and alerts us to when a database table is becoming full and action is required. This simple project now saves the teams valuable time as we used to have to manually check on a regular basis what was going on.

These are just a few examples of the systems from which we feed data into CXFINANCE. Ultimately, the strategy the Society is heading towards, is to have a ‘single pane of glass’ to monitor Society resources.

Q. It sounds like CXFINANCE has been well adopted within the back-office teams which is great to hear, can you explain your roll out process, any concerns you may have had and what you were excited about when you initially deployed the software.

A. We decided that we would initially role CXFINANCE out to our super users. We already know that these team members are open to using new tools and would be great ambassadors. They loved CXFINANCE and instantly saw how it made their work load easier. It was great to see peoples’ reactions! For so long data within the Society has been static and very one dimensional. CXFINANCE instantly brought life to our data because people were able to interact with it by drilling down from analyses to the underlying records, and to manipulate data sets to look at their data from different angles. We are hoping to use this sense of excitement as a way to drive adoption through the rest of the Society as we continue to roll CXFINANCE out to other areas.

You asked about concerns, and initially my main concern was around training. Change is not always welcome, but hopefully any concerns will be allayed by the benefits brought about by CXFINANCE

What was I most excited about? ... If I had to sum it up in one word it would be ‘change’. Seeing Swansea Building Society go through such an exciting modernisation is brilliant to be a part of. It’s wonderful to see the Society thriving, aided by powerful tools like CXFINANCE.

Q. What kind of feedback have you had from the team so far?

A. All the teams are really pleased with CXFINANCE; it’s intuitive and makes complex tasks easy. It doesn’t take long to get your base data and indexes prepared resulting in data you can rely on. It takes minutes to manipulate the data by creating crosstabs, queries and applying various filters, prior to CXFINANCE this would have been impossible at the speed and ease that we now do it at. We have seen a huge improvement in the use of our time. We have been very impressed with CXFINANCE.

From an end user point of view, they have been equally impressed. They are used to seeing very static 1D impressions of the data in the form of lists and charts. We can now provide them with dynamic data that they can drill down to, manipulate and view it from different angles. I don’t think they ever thought this would be something they’d be able to do, it’s great to see.

The training and support Connexica give to us is second to none. They took the time to tailor the training to our specific needs and showed us areas and applications within CXFINANCE which hadn’t been thought of. The potential is endless. The ongoing support we receive from the Helpdesk is great. The team responds within a matter of minutes and no question is ever too small or too big.

I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend CXFINANCE. It fits our requirements perfectly and we have only scratched the surface.

Q. What benefits have you found by using CXFINANCE?

A. The main benefit has been the time saving it has provided to us. If the team aren’t spending time carrying out mundane tasks like extracting data and compiling reports, they can spend their time supporting staff and carrying out activities that are more noticeable and provide real benefits to both the Society and to our members. Knowing that we have reliable data that is easily and quickly accessible is priceless.

The fact that we can access our data quickly, manipulate it and reformat it on the fly now means we can arm ourselves with new insight from the same data. I’m sure going forward that this will provide us with a competitive advantage.

“I would describe CXFINANCE as Powerful, Flexible and

Intuitive.”

Swansea Building Society Chris Wright, IT Application Support Analyst

Q. It’s been great to hear about what you have been up to with CXFINANCE, what does the future look like for the Society and CXFINANCE?

A. We are going through a period of growth. In the 2 years I have been with the Society, we have significantly grown both in terms of the number of staff and the number of branches. It’s an exciting time to be a part of the team at Swansea Building Society and CXFINANCE is playing its part in this success. We plan to roll out CXFINANCE throughout the Society and make more of our users self-sufficient. We are currently working on getting all of our data into one place so that all MI and data extraction will either be automated or available at a moment’s notice.

The ultimate goal is to remove the daily burden from the IT department to help free up our time for other activities through self-service data access. Giving ownership of the data back to the users.

As we continue to roll out CXFINANCE our usage will grow, areas we are looking to develop are around heat mapping and linking Google Analytics with our marketing and communication data to help us better meet the requirements of our members.

Q. What do you foresee the upcoming challenges building societies face and how could CXFINANCE help?

A. I don’t think anyone knows what is coming with Brexit and the impact it will have on the Finance sector. The ability to have the flexibility to respond to those changes and monitor its impact is going to be a massive advantage in what is likely to be an unstable time. We will be looking to CXFINANCE to help us answer some of these questions.

“We now have access to accurate and timely data helping to free up staff time.”

Swansea Building

Society Chris Wright, IT Application Support Analyst

“The training and support Connexica provide is second to none.”

Swansea Building

Society Chris Wright, IT Application Support Analyst

“We can now access dynamic data helping us to view our data from different angle.” Swansea Building Society Chris Wright, IT Application Support Analyst

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