Introduction

Visa Inc. operates the world’s largest retail electronic payments network and is one of the most recognized global financial services brand. With a product portfolio including consumer and commercial branded payment products and an estimated 8.35 trillion transactions (in 2007), Visa’s business units depend on up-to-date and often realtime data to make financial planning/budgeting decisions. However, in this newly public company— scattered across the globe— reporting practices are carried out utilizing different systems, processes and schedules. How could Visa quickly ensure that financial data could be consolidated quickly and accurately— all without sacrificing each department’s current global workflow?

Challenge

In 2008, Visa’s CFO had mandated a company-wide goal to decrease the current 9-day month-end data consolidation/reporting process to 2-days by the year 2010. Visa had budgeted for a consultant to manage this project for only 6 months. The internal experts said it would take substantially longer for a specialist to accomplish this lofty goal, but 6 months was all that could be afforded during a company-wide hiring freeze.

The challenge here was not just getting all of the data standardized, but doing so in a way that did not interrupt or change each department’s unique and specific financial entry and reporting processes. Hence, someone was needed who could work cross-functionally at a process level and manipulate and map data on the backend so no changes were seen throughout current workflows.

Solution

Within the first week of working with each department, it was quickly clear that many business practices were non-negotiable, as each department had very specific needs. As such, an advanced data consolidation process needed to be utilized:


• Consolidating each department’s multiple financial data sources into a single SQL database;
• Designing a flexible Dashboard template that could integrate data points and meet the requirements of the CFO; and
• Rolling out custom Dashboards within individual departments to enable easy data manipulation and reporting that met each specific need.

Within a matter of weeks—not years as previously estimated— each department was able to view their original Dashboard template from a centralized data source which was refreshed daily. This aided with finalizing numbers for the fiscal-year 2009 budget. After the budget was approved, new Dashboards were implemented for each department which met C-Level requirements and department-specific requests made during the planning process. The improved process was not only streamlined but also heavily automated.

Results

By using a comprehensive data migration structure, no sacrifice to current business practices needed to be made. Within only 6-months of programming and usability testing, automated financial reports now pull the latest data and graphically map according to each department’s requirements.

In the end, the skeptics were proven wrong as the company’s complete data consolidation was decreased to 48 hours in only 6 months— 2 years ahead of their target goal!