In this edition of “A Day in the Life of a Data Analyst,” we interview Stephen Bradley, Data Integrations Manager at Nusenda Credit Union. Stephen has been working at Nusenda for over eight years and has helped the organization evolve into an industry pioneer in data-driven culture.
Nusenda Credit Union is a $4.9B credit union headquartered in Albuquerque, NM. With over 20 branches across New Mexico, and four in Texas, they are the largest credit union in the area. They focus heavily on innovation and community engagement.
How Stephen Bradley Got Started In Data Analytics
Alicia Disantis: What got you interested in data analytics and credit unions?
Stephen Bradley: Well, it’s kind of funny. I was never interested in data analytics to begin with. I went to college in 2003 and thought I was going to be an architect, so I started studying civil engineering. I did what they call “3/2 program” at Bethel University – Tiny Little Cumberland Presbyterian College in the middle of nowhere Tennessee. I was going to do three years there and then two years at Vanderbilt to finish off the degree program. But my staff advisor wanted me to take programming courses right out of the gate. I just couldn’t see how it connected until I got done with my first course and realized how highly structured and logical programming was. I fell in love with programming and was like, “I don’t want to draw buildings anymore. I think I want to go and do something with this.”
Unfortunately for me, college didn’t work out too well. It was too expensive, and I was not in a place where I had financial assistance of any kind. I didn’t qualify for grants and was working a lot of student hours at a local grocery store, and still couldn’t make ends meet. I came back home to Albuquerque, NM and got a job at a call center up in Santa Fe, just answering the phones. On the side, I was teaching myself SQL server and got I got started with database administration and my certifications for Microsoft.
I met with the IT boss at the time in the hallway at the call center one day and said, “Hey, I know you guys do good work, if you ever have a help desk position open, let me know. I’m willing to work my way up and get my foot in the door.” He blew me off, and two days later I was in HR, and I was worried it was a mistake asking him. But they offered me a job as a junior database administrator. I was really floored but really grateful.
I’ve been in the IT space ever since…18 years. I’ve I worked for several different companies, then transitioned to Fidelity Investments in their health and welfare benefits administration. They manage all the health and welfare administration and payroll for a lot of Fortune 500 companies. I thought this was a great opportunity. What I didn’t realize is that much of their stuff was not necessarily data-driven, like coding and programming. It was more configuration – working on an Oracle platform – and I liked it. It was fun, new, and different.
After a couple of years, I got tired of doing the 50 miles one way each way, five days a week, to Santa Fe from Albuquerque. And at the time, I had met my now wife, and we were about to be married. Now we’ve got four beautiful children. I needed to be more stable and this job wasn’t what gave me a passion to wake up in the morning. I found an aerospace manufacturer also here in Albuquerque called M-Core and that was some of the coolest work I’ve ever done in my career. We got to do NASA missions and solar panel manufacturing. I got to work on the Parker space probe; the last of the 12 science projects that Kennedy came up with, a “mission to touch the sun.” I got to help write software that tests the solar panels that went on the probe that is now orbiting the sun and will ultimately meet its demise in the sun. It was awesome to be a part of this, but again, with a wife and four children I was working 100 hours a week and that was not sustainable.
I’d been a member of Nusenda Credit Union back when we were New Mexico Educators Federal Credit Union for many, many years. They had a job posting that came up right around the time I was feeling like I was spending too many hours working and not enough time with my family. I took the data integrations manager role at Nusenda and was introduced to the credit union movement. They have a leadership development program that I took right out of the gate and helped launch a project that started Community Day. This year, we had close to 600 of 900 employees go out and spend over 2,000 hours volunteering in the community and helping all the places that that we serve, all the way from Taos, NM down to El Paso, TX.
Alicia: I love that. My experience in with New Mexico credit unions is that they are hugely committed to their communities.
Stephen: It was a big draw of coming here. It’s a really fulfilling career.
Nusenda CU’s Advanced Data Analytics Culture
Every financial institution’s data analytics department is different. Can you tell me a little bit about your overall structure?
Stephen: I report to Jeff Benefiel, our SVP of Digital and Core Operations. He’s responsible for everything from our online banking platform to our core systems that drive our financial technologies to the development team where we’re building custom software. These are peer departments to my department. Data Integrations is responsible for the ingestion processes, helping different systems that don’t natively talk as well as business intelligence. Whether that’s SSRS, automated emails and alert notifications based on business processes, or some of the things that we’re getting into now with Gemineye, it’s very exciting. Creating an enterprise data warehouse layer with a data model, framework, and dashboards has been a vision of mine for the last six years. We tried the home-grown route, the “off the shelf and plug it in” route, and Gemineye has just been the glove that fit.
When I started at Nusenda, one of the goals was to get us off our outdated data system and onto something that’s built around modern technology. We wanted to grow the department and make sure that we had all the right roles. We did the life support for the systems and processes, making sure the customers got what they expected every morning in their inboxes. We spoon fed different data needs to different areas directly from Excel. Now some of that was automated through SQL database mail, but there was manual overhead from my department to try and make sure that everything happened consistently as expected every day.
As we’ve grown, we’ve expanded the team and grown to different roles with BI and ETL specialization. A Database Administrator, a Senior ETL Developer and an ETL Developer make up one part of our department. Another part is made up of four senior business intelligence analysts, whose roles are focused more on getting customer requirements. We’ve got our SSRS stuff set up, over 700 objects on subscription basis. We have self-serve interactive reports as well where they kind of get in and dig into the details and answer their own questions. The next step for us is the 30,000 foot-view dashboard evolution, allowing employees to drill into the individual detail of that one member for that one thing that they need.
We’ve always had a strong emphasis on proposal-writing and making sure that good ideas are supported by the different functional areas of the business. Our organization has grown to do much more strategic, collaborative data-driven decisioning; our department leaders look at organizational KPIs across the different functional departments. That collaborative approach makes sense to me, but I’ve never seen it done that way at other organizations. We need to formalize systems and make sure things aren’t just tracked on a spreadsheet somewhere.
Alicia: It sounds like you are quite advanced within your data-driven culture at this point.
Stephen: I like to think so – Nusenda has always had an emphasis on, you know, if we’re going to continue to be strategic, we need to reduce complexity wherever it comes up. This has always been a priority from our Board of Directors to our senior leaders. We were one of the first credit unions to adopt the interactive teller machines and video tellers.
This is the fourth interview I’ve conducted, and every person I’ve talked to so far has had an organic route to working in data. And I know that route has its own set of challenges. I am curious to get your take on challenges and opportunities you’ve gotten.
Stephen: I’ve tried to go back to school about four times to try and get that college degree finished. I think it’s important from an educational focus, but at the same time, with career and family, there are limiting factors. It’s a challenge that has plagued me throughout my entire career.
Over my career, helping people see what’s possible and the value of data analytics has been a focus. You’ve got to be part salesman as a data analyst to convince people that the investment in these platforms is worth it. But once you can get some momentum, then it’s easy to get everybody to come on board with you. When I was at the aerospace company, that was a challenge. And when I was at Fidelity – a huge international company – didn’t understand it quite yet.
What are opportunities you’ve been given to get you to where you are today?
Stephen: You know MDC conference a couple years ago and attended a workshop on machine learning and AI in the credit union space. And fundamentally it hit on all the issues that we were just talking about: we have a wealth of data which will allow us to make well informed decisions but couldn’t find the right data analytics platform. The opportunity to go to the MDC conference and hear of a platform and a company like Gemineye was eye-opening. When I researched Gemineye, I realized that this is the solution that I’ve been wanting this whole time.
We had spent the better part of five years trying to make my vision reality, but faced two challenges: I couldn’t carve off enough time for my team to build something from scratch with the level of rigor and detail that is necessary for success, but off-the-shelf products were limited too because we had to fit in somebody else’s MO.
Gemineye is a unified model that’s already established, it’s credit union specific, and it’s completely adaptable, so my team can leverage their existing skill sets and augment the heck out of it. Databricks has been a little bit new to us, but it’s provided another good opportunity for us to see new cutting-edge technologies. It’s been out for 12 years but I don’t think it has gotten enough hype in the credit union space or enough accurate recognition for the value that it adds to native AI, data flows, and visualization tools all in one platform. That’s been a huge opportunity.
A Typical Day for the Nusenda CU Data Team
Walk me through a typical day – if there is such a thing as a typical day.
Stephen: Every day starts off with checking in on alerting, process health, and making sure everyone who is on call has what they need to be successful. Sometimes the issues that we’re facing are brand new things that are vendor caused. Maybe they’ve changed a data file format; there’s always a curveball that gets thrown at us. Every day we make sure that expected data is hot and ready first thing in the morning at 7:00 AM and reports to roll out starting at 8:30 and be delivered by 10.
Escalations are another common thing. If a job didn’t fail or we didn’t have something to go down hard, sometimes there’s a data nuance that gets discovered by our customers. We’ve got a ticketing system that does case management for us, as well as a tuned triage process where we automate the workload across our resources, but making sure it’s continuing to move and nothing gets stuck anywhere along the pipeline is critical.
Another big piece is performance management. We started as a small team and now we’re a team of eight. I’m hoping the team grows even more and we’ll have more opportunity for specialization, career growth and helping my folks see their potential and really get to do the things that excite them. It gives me a lot of pride to help develop a pipeline for the department. Helping my team achieve what they want to achieve is so important to employee retention.
Do you have any specific time aside for strategy?
Stephen: Definitely. We have weekly or biweekly meetings with different departments, like the marketing team. Some of my staff and I talk about strategic goals and upcoming projects specific to that department. We also meet with other teams like quality assurance or card services and just make sure that their needs are well-represented. We also have another internal department that reports to my boss called “Business Transformation,” which takes ideas that are coming from anywhere across the organization and helps put some legs to them. A lot of these ideas turn into good business process improvements that my team gets to help support.
Share an example of a business transformation idea with us.
Stephen: We’ve helped implement RPA (robotic processing automation) which is an idea directly from the business transformation team. We’ve been developing SSRS reports for daily lists of auto loans which were paid off early, notifying us about a refund gap or mechanical breakdown. These lists ensure that insurance products get resolved properly and the member gets the most money back. This process used to be very manual: somebody would get a PDF or an Excel sheet, and it was tedious and time consuming. Now we send out emails to members. Another example was an idea from a card services employee on travel notes. There’s a lot of information that goes into members who are traveling to places that we don’t expect them to travel to and making sure that their cards aren’t blocked. Through our development team, we built a custom solution that integrates with our contact center and our frontline staff and provides self-serv options through our mobile banking platform. It also aggregates data, so we now get reporting analytics on where our members are travelling.
Alright, so the last question I’ll ask you is what’s something you could spend all day doing?
Stephen: Camping. I work with my brain and computers all day long, and so when I’m done, I like to go out and do stuff with my hands. I like to be outdoors. I could go camping for a month and not have a device and be just happy as a clam.
