Transforming Financial Data Integration at eMoney

6-week implementation

from project kickoff to production

2-person team

managing analytics stack

• Key takeaways
  • About eMoney
  • An integrated, data-first organization that focuses on the customer
  • Looker and Etleap: a strategic technology stack
  • Embracing the cloud securely and rapidly
  • Understanding and enhancing the customer journey
  • Secure efficiency gains
  • Transforming effort and project measurements
  • It’s not just about data; it’s about people

Key takeaways

• Rapid time-to-value for the new analytics stack: Six weeks from project kickoff to production implementation
• Improved, quantifiable visibility into the customer journey and experience
• Increased internal efficiency across teams and operations
• Achieved 100% enterprise wide data adoption by focusing on individual team needs and implementing a hub-and spoke data team model

About eMoney

eMoney Advisor provides technology solutions and services that help people talk about money. Rooted in comprehensive financial planning, eMoney’s solutions strengthen client relationships, streamline business operations, enhance business development, and drive overall growth. More than 70,000 financial professionals across firms of all sizes use the eMoney platform to serve more than 4 million households throughout the United States. eMoney’s team of more than 700 focuses on ensuring that customers have a positive, frictionless experience. The company leverages an innovative technology stack and data insights to deliver on that customer promise.

An integrated, data-first organization that focuses on the customer

Like many companies, eMoney was dealing with multiple data silos and managed several products across its internal teams and business units. It was difficult to achieve the unified, client-first mindset they were committed to with their previous tech stack. In order to gain insights into and improve their client experience even more, they felt migrating to the cloud and leveraging integrations between tools was an important and inevitable investment.

“From a technical perspective, we wanted to build a bigger footprint in the cloud, and our data stack was a great way to start. From a data perspective, the idea was to build the integrations so we could measure the customer journey and the process gaps, and then design solutions to improve flow,” shares Barrie Effron, vice president of information systems and delivery.

In addition to focusing on the client journey, the eMoney team was also committed to delivering more accessible and actionable insights across the organization for their internal users, whom they value as critical customers of their data and analytics program. To create a modern and person-first product and data experience, the eMoney team created clear criteria for their unified data solution.

The solution had to be cloud-based. The move to the cloud was inevitable and would make integration with other applications easier and faster.

• Security was non-negotiable, as financial services is a highly regulated industry and of critical importance to the team.
• Clear and consistent data governance at all levels was required — conflicting metrics would not help anyone and would lose trust with their internal users.
• Ramp time must be rapid, ideally with a small investment in headcount.
• The solution should support data self-service to help more eMoney employees access, understand, and act on data.

Looker and Etleap: a strategic technology stack

Today, eMoney runs their data solution as a full analytics stack in a virtual private cloud (VPC). They integrate data from existing on-premises and cloud services into Amazon Redshift using Etleap — running Redshift, Etleap, and Looker inside an Amazon Web Services (AWS) VPC. This allows the company to leverage the power and flexibility of the cloud while maintaining compliance with a complex set of security policies.

eMoney’s data infrastructure stack with Etleap and Looker.

The company chose Etleap as its ETL solution to centralize data from databases, applications, and hosted services into a cloud data warehouse. By leveraging Etleap’s native source integrations and data pipeline automation, eMoney was able to achieve a fast ETL build-out. “If we built it ourselves, our ramp time would be really slow, but Etleap got us up and running very quickly,” says Alicia Minella, eMoney’s data and analytics manager. Etleap connects to eMoney’s various systems, and Minella’s team controls which objects and fields are piped into AWS Redshift.

_