CASE STUDY
Mukuru
Implementing a modern data stack to drive data accessibility, increase productivity and generate valuable insights.
.png?width=149&height=130&name=mukurulogo%20(1).png)
Introduction
Mukuru is one of the largest money transfer providers in Africa and a leading Next Gen Financial Services Platform that offers affordable and reliable financial services to the emerging consumer.
Mukuru offers a wide range of products and services that take their cue from their customer’s needs and aspirations for greater financial security and a better life.
"Datalab really has the capability to 10X your chances of success on your data analytics journey"
Saad Panjwani, Head of Business Intelligence - Mukuru
Using data to provide better services to customers.
Mukuru is a digital financial services platform for Africa's emerging consumer. An African neobank, so to speak, we offer a range of financial services and products that allow our customers to send money, hold a digital store of value and transact. In simple terms, Mukuru wants to be there for their customers whenever they want to send, store or spend..
Challenge
As a financial services platform, through our operations we generate large volumes of data. However, this data for the longest time was locked away, latent.
Fundamentally the company lacked access to reliable data with which to use for strategic decision making, go-to-market activities, risk management and mitigation, designing of product experiences, just to name a few in terms of the areas where we lacked data to make use for.
At the time, the business had a very small team of junior data professionals providing some MI reporting of a stack that was essentially a proof of concept and couldn't satisfy the scale and business requirements reliably
Solution
Mukuru needed both an advisor as well as implementation partner. A partner with demonstrated expertise where helping businesses select the right cloud data tooling and architecture that will go on to satisfy the business needs from the data, but also cognizant of the current data maturity of the team and the business, and with the flexibility to evolve as the data capabilities and maturity within the organization mature.
In addition to that, advisory and implementation partner with expert expertise across data engineering for the integration and pipeline building, warehouse, warehouse modelling and architecture to shape that data in a consumable format for analytics and reporting, as well as providing an analytics layer so that the analytics community and business community could consume those analytics in an accessible way. A partner with experience within data migrations from legacy systems to modern data architectures, cloud experience was critical there. A partner with a strong bias and appetite to train and set up an existing team to maintain and take the new data stack forward. I think to wrap it up in a bow, a partner with a practical or project management approach with reasonable, with realistic proposal within of timelines and budgets. And I guess that that was the cross section in terms of what we wanted and that informed our selection of data.
Implementation
Datalab helped stand up an enterprise data warehouse and Mukuru is a scale-up, fast-growing business. So we really needed a pragmatic project management approach, and Datalab’s approach allowed us to solve the key problems while also being flexible to accommodate important changes as their needs arose. They accelerated certain parts of that development through their expertise and experience on other similar projects so we could benefit from those learnings, sort of the hard yards already being spent and we were the beneficiaries of a springboard of a solution.
They're very responsive, so we would get assistance and feedback early, often from a committed senior team. The Datalab team is extremely knowledgeable. I think on a day-to-day basis and week by week, just the team was guaranteed to come with many aha moments and just developing or growing our knowledge within data management and analytics here.
“Mukuru needed a partner with demonstrated expertise with helping businesses select the right cloud data tools and architecture that will satisfy business needs “
Results
Timely reporting
Mukuru came from a place where they were delivering reporting two or three times a week, with I 50 percent confidence in the reliability to now an almost 100 percent reliability in delivering data daily.
Modern platform
Further enhancing the solution's robustness, Snowflake was utilized as the data warehousing platform, offering unparalleled scalability and performance.
Scalable solution
Datalab helped build a reliable and extensible data warehouse and reporting platform where we have at least an average of 200 consumers who actively interact with the data.
Reliable solution
Datalab helped more than double their productivity of individual data professionals by eliminating the need to nurse frequently failing data pipelines and or data quality issues.
Next Steps
Mukuru and Datalab continue their close working relationship today. Future owrk aims to support Mukuru in onboarding data through their aquisition strategy and looking at how Mukuru can leverage unstructured data generated in their call centre to improve their services to their customers.
Download the Case Study
Related resources
