United Bank Limited (UBL), a Pakistani banking and financial services leader, serves over 11 million customers nationwide and operates 1,338 branches and 1,445 ATMs, along with its branchless banking proposition (combination ATM and online banking).
In 2022, UBL was awarded Best Bank for Digital Solutions by Asiamoney and Market Leader of Digital Banking in Pakistan by Euromoney, a testament to its track record as the best in digital banking.
UBL needed a superior data platform to handle the increasing volume and improve the business
With UBL’s growing success, the bank needed to accommodate its growing volume of data. To this end, UBL embarked on a data analytics project that would achieve its goals for an improved data environment. First, it needed customized engagement models that would improve the customer experience. Next, it needed to enhance the company’s customer-centric approach for a needs-based alignment of products and services. And finally, UBL wanted to be able to strengthen its organizational decision-making capabilities. All of this needed to be achieved within the company’s operational efficiency and excellence standards.
UBL selected Cloudera for its data platform and Blutech Consulting—Pakistan’s leading data analytics company and the preferred partner of Cloudera—for the implementation. Both Cloudera and Blutech enabled UBL to achieve its vision around data analytics.
Overall, the implementation was seamless and used a single agile approach. Together with Cloudera and Blutech, UBL achieved this major milestone in under six weeks. This was made possible thanks to the right leadership and a sound technical team on the ground that understood the complexities around technology integration.
Mr. Faisal Anwar, CIO of UBL, was the champion of this end-to-end flagship program, which set the benchmark for the financial sector in Pakistan.
“The implementation has been fast and smooth, and our teams have already begun to witness the benefits of Cloudera’s data platform. We are positive that our continuing partnership with Cloudera and Blutech Consulting will be foundational to our customer-centric approach, considerably improving our customer responsiveness,” he said.
On a successful delivery, Mr. Kashif Jadoon, CEO of Blutech Consulting, said, “For UBL we aimed to achieve an innovative, unified platform that is built to meet UBL’s future needs and cater to the analytics demands of tomorrow. We work as a partner to our customer and Cloudera’s CDP is the only modern solution that enables us to deploy fast with minimal impact to operations while addressing the system, hosting, integration, and security.”
A complete data analytics solution returning key benefits
UBL has already realized some key benefits from using the Cloudera Data Platform, such as:
Machine learning and AI has been infused into key decision-making processes. This includes decisions around the optimal amount of cash in every bank’s ATM, or proactively classifying every digital transaction as fraud/non-fraud, which are now driven through data and AI.
Analytics for everyone. UBL has initiated Analytics for Everyone, a self-service business analytics capability for the bank’s various business units. Besides reducing its dependency on IT for providing insights, it also enabled the business units to make data-driven decisions.
Leadership visibility. The platform has created a consolidated view of the business for UBL’s management and top leadership. Executive dashboards have been built for senior leaders including the president and CEO and chief digital officer, to provide them with a holistic overview and the key data they require.
Single source of truth. A comprehensively built data foundation is used as a data hub built on CDP, which is treated as a single source of truth for downstream business applications. These applications connect to the data hub instead of connecting to individual source systems and having to navigate a complex series of data pipelines.
Mr. Kashif Riaz, head of data and AI at UBL, shared his thoughts on this project. “To unlock the true potential of our data, we need the best technology solution, which can enable us to provide greater experience and insights to our customers. With this major upgrade from HDP to CDP, UBL has not only unlocked new and enhanced functionality but will also be able to fuel its data and digital transformation journey moving forward.”
To find out more about how Cloudera empowers financial services leaders to realize the endless possibilities of data, read our latest FSI Guide, A world without limits.
