RCI Bank and Services Transforms Data Management with Alteryx and Drives Businesses Forward

RCI Bank and Services is the Renault Group’s financial services brand. This French multinational operates in the automotive industry, and is a result of the Renault-Nissan Alliance, which includes several other brands including Renault, Dacia, Nissan, and Infiniti. With more than 50 years in the automotive-specific financial products and services sector, RCI supports dealers in sales processes where company brands need financing. Thanks to its experience in and knowledge of the financial services market and the automotive industry, RCI has developed a strategy of diversifying its offering, adapting to the actual requirements of its customers, guaranteeing the highest quality standards and after-sales satisfaction.

The Importance of Digitization & Data Management

RCI Bank and Services offers its Services to individuals and Companies that want to take advantage of the credit facilities and financing available. They also focus on other areas like digitization and data management. “We always aim to be on the cutting edge of technology and digitization, as it’s critical within the financial services world,” says Jaime Periquet, Chief Data Officer at RCI Bank and Services. “We really focus on data – it’s our main asset and a strategic part of our work – our bread and butter! It lets us accelerate the Renault Group’s business. This is despite the fact that it’s a Subsidiary with a lower turnover than other parts of the Group. We have a knack for working with startups, and that allows us to be a benchmark at a tech level within Renault. Our intervention rates are really high and we’re super agile when it comes to our response.”

“In Spain, we’re at the forefront of implementing predictive models thanks to Alteryx,” states Periquet. “It’s the only country with working predictive models that are directly connected with our financial institutions. When it comes to data management, we have a data warehouse and offer a data service – with 20 years’ experience, we’re supporting and often leading the change in data strategy globally. As for the rest of the Company, the Group created a Data Department with the Chief Data Officer as the primary Lead. There’s a Data Governance Strategy too, and a Target Operating Model that specifies responsibilities, roles, the technology and structure to be employed for managing data on a global scale.”

The Tech Landscape prior to Alteryx

Before the implementation of Alteryx, RCI Staff used Microsoft Excel for pricing, risk calculation, sales forecasts, results forecasting and recovering debts. The capacity for innovation and the implementation of new projects was reduced as a result of this. The Company managed multiple solutions. There was an SAS-trained credit scoring tool, an Oracle data warehouse, an ad hoc ERP, Business Objects for operational BI reporting and SalesForce as a CRM tool, plus SAP for accounting. The Company also had some in-house applications for ETL and web analytics. Essentially, the data from all these tools was totally disperse, so the RCI team couldn’t work consistently.

Starting to Work with Alteryx

RCI Bank and Services found out about Alteryx’ capabilities via a use case from the Management Control Department. It was an ETL (Extract, Transform and Load) project to automate and clean up Excel files with formula, linking very complex data. From that starting point, the Company decided to onboard Alteryx, having seen that it could be a strategic investment worldwide, reducing the generation of long lines of code by simply clicking and dragging a box. This simplifies workflow management and the creation of new workflow tasks.

The main users of Alteryx technology are the Data Team and the Risk Department, as well as people who work on the most complex projects. “Having Alteryx technology has given us more autonomy and freedom in the way we work, as the Data Team focuses on delivering value by managing data in a smart way, rather than building that data repeatedly,” notes Jaime Periquet.

Implementing Alteryx has democratized ETL tools (data extraction, transformation and loading processes) and Data Science in general, which was inaccessible before for a lot of people. Tech makes it possible to unify data and easily reach all Departments in the Organization, basically. Now the company is 10 times more agile and has a flexible working methodology that has increased productivity. RCI has gone from using 5 data applications to managing more than 30 in parallel – that makes it a key area for decision making.

In no time at all, RCI began to see results. The optimization of data processing in Excel improved significantly in a matter of weeks. And the advanced analytics model started to impact the Business in under 6 months.

Impact on Processes & Transforming the Business

“Alteryx hasn’t replaced any existing technology. Instead, it’s been key to improve the performance of all our tools, and to have a more connected technology ecosystem,” explains Jaime Periquet. Building new applications with Alteryx gives RCI faster processes that used to involve months of work. Now they can be delivered in just a few days. Response times are much more agile, because teams of professionals are dedicated to tasks that really add value to the Company.

Using Alteryx technology has led to a qualitative leap for RCI in terms of data management, complex predictive modeling, and Staff resource optimization. For example, RCI receives around 200,000 emails every year. The Organization invested in several full time staff to classify and process the messages. With Alteryx, a connection with SFDC was established and using certain keywords, a predictive model was created too. The Company is now able to classify the emails into 40 categories with a 90% success rate. With Alteryx, RCI managed to increase the contact rate from 50% to 80%, significantly reducing reputational risk.

The Company also increased automatic credit acceptance by applying Alteryx-trained predictive logistic regression models. This saves a serious amount of time for the Verification Agents, who can carry out more worthwhile activities. It has had a significant impact on the Company’s efficiency and on its budget. Finally, the Company has reduced manual checks in a big way, thanks to the fraud detection model. With these time savings, Agents have reduced fraud by 40%. This also has a major impact on the cost of risk, which has now decreased by approximately 30%, saving several million Euros per year and significantly increasing net revenue. At the same time, the implementation of this new system has reduced the error rate by 50%, turning mistakes into a thing of the past – more or less.

All of these business process benefits have directly affected the ability to retain the Company’s most valuable Talent. The staff turnover rate, which was 20%, has been reduced to less than 10% today. Technology also has an impact on the motivation of our Teams.

In short, RCI has been able to optimize resources by automating, classifying and processing more than 200,000 emails receives annually with a 90% success rate. It has also achieved a 30% increase in automatic credit acceptance thanks to the application of predictive logistic regression models that are trained through the Alteryx technology. That’s a 30% time saving for RCI’s Verification Agents, who can apply themselves to higher value-added activities. This has significantly impacted both the Company’s efficiency and budget and has hugely improved working conditions for Staff.