MasterCard Improves Customer Experience Through Self-Service Data Prep
Background
MasterCard is a technology company in the global payments industry. It operates the
world’s fastest payments processing network, connecting consumers, financial institutions,
merchants, governments and businesses in more than 210 countries and territories.
MasterCard’s products and solutions make everyday commerce activities – such as
shopping, traveling, running a business and managing finances – easier, more secure
and more efficient for everyone.
Challenge
Derek Madison, Leader of Business Financial Support at MasterCard, oversees the
validation of transactions and cash between two systems, whether they’re MasterCard
owned or not. He was charged with identifying new ways to increase efficiency and improve
MasterCard processes. At the outset, the 13-person team had to manually reconcile system
interfaces using reports that resided on the company’s mainframe. Their first order of
business each day was to print 20-30 individual, multi-page reports. Using a ruler to keep
their place within each report, they would then hand-key the relevant data, line by line,
into Excel for validation. “We’re talking about a task that took 40-80 hours each week,”
recalls Madison, “As a growing company with rapidly expanding product offerings,
we had to find a better way to prepare this data for analysis.”
Solution
After creating some reusable data prep models with Altair® Monarch®, Madison and team
were able to convert the needed mainframe files into a tabular data file ready for analysis.
Since specific dates and times were recorded on mainframe reports, Madison created
a program to rename the output files and save them to a location that corresponded with
the date. This allowed the team to quickly access reports, export them to a constant data
set name and perform lookups for that day’s Excel reconciliations. By automating this
process, the time-intensive manual hand keying was eliminated, allowing the team
to shift their resources to higher value and more strategic goals.
Results
“The Monarch solution paid for itself within the first six months, liberating our
department from manual data entry and enabling us to recoup 40-80 hours a week,”
says Madison. “As a result, we have been able to expand our skill set to become more
involved across new products and services and excel in customer service.” When a
MasterCard customer is unable to reconcile bank accounts or transactions, the team
can now easily pull that customer’s transaction detail into Monarch for analysis. Using
Monarch to run queries on an ad hoc basis gives them better customer service request
results that weren’t possible before. “I’m confident that we will continue to uncover
opportunities within MasterCard where we can expand our use of Monarch. Our success
within customer service is proof of that.