Oakbrook Finance has clawed back roughly three months of data engineering time by adopting an automated integration platform, allowing its lean in-house team to shift focus from pipeline maintenance to product development and customer analytics.
The specialist UK consumer lender, which serves near-prime and non-prime borrowers typically passed over by high-street banks, selected Fivetran to centralise and govern data across its analytics estate. The deployment supports customer insight, product development, marketing effectiveness and machine learning workflows, according to the company.
Business model built on speed
Oakbrook was founded in 2011 and has lent more than £1.5 billion to UK customers. It currently serves around 140,000 active borrowers. A significant proportion of applications arrive through price comparison websites, where Oakbrook has less than ten seconds to ingest data, run its models and return an offer.
“Our data engineering team is lean and deliberately focused. Before Fivetran, a meaningful chunk of their time was spent maintaining pipelines rather than building things that move the business forward,” said Ed Ball, Head of Data and Security at Oakbrook. “Fivetran has let us connect data sources we wouldn’t have reached otherwise, which has materially expanded what we can analyse and model, from customer behaviour through to how our products perform in the market. That’s directly fed into work like the launch of OakbrookOne, our debt consolidation product.”
How Fivetran streamlines data integration for Oakbrook
To meet its time-critical requirements without adding operational overhead, Oakbrook adopted an automated approach to data integration. Fivetran now ingests around five million rows of data for the lender each month, creating a consistent, governed data layer that spans the business. The platform enables the company to centralise and govern data from multiple sources, supporting an open data infrastructure model in which data remains accessible, consistent and under Oakbrook’s own control.
“Financial services organisations are under pressure to move faster while maintaining strict governance and control over their data,” said Alex Cresswell, Regional Vice President for Northern Europe, the Middle East and Africa at Fivetran. “An open data infrastructure allows them to do both, by ensuring data is accessible, governed, and usable across systems without adding operational complexity.”
The centralised data layer has directly supported the launch of OakbrookOne, a debt consolidation loan product that has enabled more than £50 million in consolidation lending. Customers using OakbrookOne save an average of £110 a month, and more than 40 percent receive same-day settlement of their existing debts.
