How to turn Excel into an integral part of your data infrastructure

Excel is always the go-to tool for any ad-hoc process and it's easy to understand why. Let's take an example.  

A bank has terminated relationships with several customers due to their failure to provide proper KYC (Know Your Customer) information. Six months later, one of those customers attempts to re-engage with the bank, this time through a different branch. To prevent that from happening, the bank needs to keep track of these customers somewhere. However, their CRM system lacks an efficient method to retrieve information on previous customers. Consequently, they maintain a spreadsheet of exited customers on Sharepoint, which the onboarding team can browse through when vetting new customer applications.  

This is obviously not an optimal solution, as such manual cross-checking introduces great risk for errors, or simply just forgetting to check the list at all. The optimal solution would have been that the historical information about the customer automatically gets included as a part of the onboarding process, alerting the case handler that this person has been rejected as a customer before. However, developing a solution like this tends to require too much effort in most traditional data infrastructures.

Another example may be due diligence best practices for industry risk – What due diligence controls should I consider if I am reviewing a fishing company? These type of guidance documents may often be stored in a spreadsheet because it's easy to update. However, the optimal situation would have been if the specific guidance could pop up when the user reviewed a fishing company.  

Convier acknowledges the value in both sophisticated data warehouses and simple spreadsheets, as they both fit a user's need. That is why we have designed our platform to make it really easy to integrate whatever data source needed. The platform allows swift integration of any new data sources that comes along, whether it be a whole new data warehouse or a humble spreadsheet.

Curious to learn more? We've made a simple video that takes you through how easy it is to bridge spreadsheets from Google Drive or Sharepoint with your other datewarehouse data in Convier.

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