RFi Group partners with Yellowfin to deliver banking and finance industry “best analytics platform on the planet”

RFi Group – a global provider of research-based intelligence to the financial services industry – has partnered with global Business Intelligence (BI) and analytics software vendor, Yellowfin, to deliver a Web-based analytics platform for the banking and finance sector.

Named RFi Group’s Beyond Analytics Platform and powered by Yellowfin’s BI solution, the online portal enables RFi Group’s clients to quickly, easily and securely access the most up-to-date consumer-based financial research via interactive reports, visualizations and dashboards. For RFi Group and its clients, laboriously producing and poring over emails containing static, and potentially outdated, PDFs and Excel-based reports is a thing of the past.

“Yellowfin has empowered RFi Group to provide the banking and finance industry with the best analytics platform on the planet,” said RFi Group Benchmarking Director, Charles Higby. “RFi Group conducts some of the largest and most comprehensive financial research in the world, surveying over 350,000 consumers annually. RFi Group’s Beyond Analytics Platform, underpinned by Yellowfin’s BI software, provides a secure multi-tenant platform for our customers to access next generation benchmarking analytics on the device of their choice.”

Clients of RFi Group’s Beyond Analytics Platform are harnessing the solution to explore metrics related to three core areas, including industry trends, macro-economic trends and anonymous peer benchmarks that enable clients to compare performance against competitors across a range of KPIs.

“RFi Group’s Beyond Analytics Platform is a great example of moving up the chain of analytics from diagnostic to predictive analytics,” said Head of Retail Risk for ANZ, Jason Humphrey.

RFi Group Benchmarking CTO, Reinis Grauds, said that by using Yellowfin’s BI solution to power RFi Group’s Beyond Analytics Platform, organizations in the banking and finance industry could now explore, share and act on critical competitive insights faster and easier than ever before.

“Yellowfin provides a device independent, functionally rich, easy to use, secure and flexible presentation layer through which RFi Group’s banking and finance clients can consume and act on the most up-to-date insights,” said Grauds. “The solution will improve the consistency, depth and timeliness of insights for our clients, allowing them to drill into interactive reports and fully explore their data while better retaining organizational knowledge. Our clients love the collaboration functionality.”

To deliver RFi Group’s Beyond Analytics Platform, Yellowfin has been deployed as a multi-tenant installation into a multiple server environment with discrete databases for each client. RFi Group has Yellowfin running on Microsoft SQL Server, as are its client databases. Security Servers are Linux-based for reverse proxy, LDAP and audited two-factor authentication.

Before the release of its Beyond Analytics Platform, RFi Group would cleanse research data on a monthly basis, then use an in-house solution, leveraging Microsoft SQL Server BI edition and custom code to deliver reports to clients via email as static Excel and PDF files. As the amount of data and frequency of data RFi Group collected ballooned, this arduous process and outdated mode of information delivery became increasingly unacceptable.

“From the perspective of RFi Group, delivering insights to our clients in this way was becoming excessively resource intensive, disparate and slow,” said Higby. “We also understood that searching through emails to retrieve static file-based reports made it difficult for clients to find desired information quickly or easily explore data to uncover new insights. RFi Group wanted to deliver a more gratifying, insightful and immediate experience where customers could interactively explore live data via intuitive reports, visualizations and dashboards. We wanted to dramatically improve our customer offering.”

From a feature – function perspective, Grauds said that RFi Group chose to integrate Yellowfin into its Beyond Analytics Platform in equal measure for its unique end-user product capabilities and its ability to meet IT demand for robust governance and security mechanisms.

“The intuitive interface has removed the need for specialized IT skills when creating a report package, putting the power in the hands of our consultants and clients – where it deserves to be,” said Grauds. “From a system administration point of view, Yellowfin’s multi-tenant features mean that RFi Group’s clients can securely explore their data, safe in the knowledge that only the right people are able to view their critical business information. Yellowfin was also able to integrate seamlessly with existing security protocols, enabling us to implement strong two-factor authentication and work with our existing LDAP for credential management.”

“Yellowfin is very excited to be involved in RFi Group’s unique and highly valuable analytics initiative for the banking and financial industry,” said Yellowfin CEO, Glen Rabie. “From a business perspective, Yellowfin’s flexible partner revenue share model allowed RFi Group to deliver on its vision of rolling out an online analytics portal that would be accessible to its entire client base. Technologically, Yellowfin has allowed RFi Group’s Beyond Analytics Platform to facilitate independent end-user data analysis and exploration, while minimizing implementation and management requirements placed on IT resources.”

The RFi Group’s Beyond Analytics Platform comes with a series of out-of-the-box reports available to new customers, with clients able to work independently or in collaboration with RFi Group to develop additional customized BI content.

About RFi Group

Founded in 2006 by Charles Green and Alan Shields, RFi Group is a global intelligence and media provider, focusing exclusively on financial services.

With offices in Toronto, Washington D.C., London, Hong Kong, Singapore and Sydney, RFi Group specializes in data and information gathering, customer-based insight generation and business decision support for the world’s leading financial service providers. RFi Group covers 34 global markets, combining global intelligence and local knowledge to deliver clients actionable and independent insights and recommendations relevant to their specific business needs.

RFi Group has had an annualized growth rate of 55 percent year-on-year since 2007, was listed on BRW Fast Starters in 2010 and 2011, and was listed on BRW Fast 100 in 2011, 2012, 2013 and 2014.

For more information visit www.rfintelligence.com

About Yellowfin

Yellowfin is a global Business Intelligence (BI) and analytics software vendor passionate about making BI easy. Founded in 2003 in response to the complexity and costs associated with implementing and using traditional BI tools, Yellowfin is a highly intuitive 100 percent Web-based reporting and analytics solution. Yellowfin is a leader in mobile, collaborative and embedded BI, as well as Location Intelligence and data visualization.

Over 10,000 organizations, and more than one million end-users across 70 different countries, use Yellowfin every day. For more information, visit www.yellowfinbi.com

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