Introduction
Understanding your clients' data analytics needs is crucial as a fintech provider. Your clients have various queries about their fintech data (such as transaction data, revenue management data, asset management data, and more) that, when answered, can significantly streamline their business procedures. As a result, your clients may start requesting you to integrate analytics natively within your software to answer their frequent inquiries.
Some examples of questions your clients want to answer are:
- Are there any predictors of fraud or refunds in the financial data?
- What is my total spend/revenue by product category?
- Are there any areas of spend or revenue that are on the rise?
- And more…
Providing these responses directly within your software becomes critical as your business grows. Although exporting data via CSV might be sufficient in the early stages, it becomes a potential risk as you scale, with clients possibly transferring their data to more capable platforms.
Approaches to Advanced Analytics by Industry Leaders
Stripe
Stripe has an extremely famous dashboarding product. It does a wonderful job of generating common high-level metrics that businesses typically want. Further, Stripe offers an ‘Edit overview’ option to allow for you to add charts to your dashboard that are of particular interest to your business, or to delete charts that aren’t.
Finally, Stripe enables you to export your data for further analysis, and filtering within their application to get just the data you want.
In many ways, Stripe has defined the Minimum Viable Dashboarding that users expect in the revenue and transaction management space. Put another way, if users are to use another platform other than Stripe, they expect much of these features to be available out-of-the-box.
Brex
Brex understands how important analytics is for the card spend and runway management industry. Brex has recently completed the acquisition of a company called Pry, which largely operates in the startup analytics space. With Pry, founders can set custom dashboards to track important company metrics, such as burn, runway, and spend. Brex understood that this was a key part of their value offering and acquired this company of 10 people for $90M, showing their continued commitment to the spend and revenue analytics space.
Further, Brex has built a custom dashboarding experience in their Compliance section of their platform, similar to Stripe’s experience, with the ability to add additional filters and widgets to create a truly custom dashboarding experience. Brex, just like Stripe, has defined a minimum experience that companies expect when choosing a corporate card or spend management tool in the fintech space.
Quickbooks
With Quickbooks Enterprise Advanced Analytics, customers can access the underlying data used to create visualizations and make tweaks. Further, Quickbooks offers dozens of different templated options to help explore the data. Quickbooks understands that customers expect advanced reporting data and have taken it a step further by allowing extremely advanced data manipulation with their reporting offering.
As you can see, integrating analytics directly into your platform can significantly enhance customer value and increase revenue per customer, developing these tools can be extremely costly and time-consuming, particularly as customer demands for additional features and data insights grow more complex.
So, what's the solution for SaaS businesses looking to incorporate advanced analytics without breaking the bank? Let's explore how modern embedded analytics tools come into the picture.
Leveraging Modern Embedded Analytics Tools
Today's top-of-the-line embedded analytics tools offer a variety of high-impact features from the start. These include sophisticated filtering, detailed charting, advanced mapping, automated data layers for caching, analytics tracking, API for seamless client setup and management, a drag-and-drop chart interface, and customizable styling options.
Not only do they cover a host of functionalities, but these tools also comply with standards such as SOC 2 Type 2, HIPAA, and GDPR, easing your compliance burden. In addition, many such tools offer no-code interfaces that enable non-technical team members like customer success managers (CSMs) to make modifications for users, facilitating a superior, high-touch customer interaction.
Lastly, the rise of artificial intelligence has paved the way for the most advanced embedded analytics tools to incorporate features that can expedite answering client queries. This is achieved with the assistance of natural language processing systems in-app, enabling faster, more intuitive interaction with data and analytics.
This increase in the sophistication of analytics tools is revolutionizing how businesses approach and understand their data, bringing a new level of insight and understanding to their operations.
But with a plethora of options out there, which tool offers the best combination of features and user-friendliness? Let's take a look at one such tool: Explo.
Introduction to Explo: The Advanced Reporting Tool
Explo, an embedded data visualization tool, provides an efficient solution for quick development of advanced analytics features in your application. With just a few lines of code, Explo allows you to offer analytics and reporting directly within your application.
Integration is simple: Connect your data warehouse, establish client-level data security and segmentation, and then enable your users to visualize their data on your platform. Explo offers an Explore product for viewing pre-configured visualizations and a Report Builder for self-service data exploration.
With Explo, setting up a Stripe or Brex dashboarding experience is extremely quick. With our editable dashboarding features, you can define pre-built analytics in just a few steps, and additional, draggable templates for your users to drag onto the dashboard.
Interested in building this experience in just a few minutes to replicate Stripe or Brex dashboarding? Reach out to team@explo.co and we can get you up-and-running in minutes!
Quick Deployment of Advanced Reporting akin to Stripe, Brex, and Quickbooks
For this example, we will dive a layer deeper than just Stripe/Brex dashboards. In just a handful of minutes, we can build additional, advanced reporting (similar to Quickbooks Enterprise Advanced Reporting) that can be paired with Explo’s standard reporting to allow your users to answer any questions they’d like about their financial data.
Let's walk through a quick tutorial of setting up custom reporting for fintech data using the power of Explo:
1. Connect your data warehouse: Choose from our wide range of connection offerings. This allows us to read your database and create visualizations based on real-time data.
In this example, our data warehouse consists of a Spending table with the following columns:Transaction Date, Transaction Amount, Merchant Name, Product Category, Refunded Purchase Date
Note: this example is geared towards spending data, but the same principles can be applied to revenue management, asset management, or other areas in Fintech. Even if this example doesn’t directly apply to your business, feel free to keep reading to get great insights about your business!
2. Create default reports: From this table, we can generate default reports, which can be customized per client. This allows your customer support managers to offer a personalized experience to their users.
Default reports provide a foundation for your clients to start thinking about their data. They can modify these reports and refine the queries to get more detailed answers.
For instance, you could set up reports to answer frequently asked questions such as:
- Are there any merchants that have higher rates of refunds? Has this changed over time?
- What is my average purchase by merchant in each category?
- What’s been driving my recent increase in sales?
- In this example, you can see that Entertainment has been the category that has driven increase in sales recently, but specifically Charlie Inc has been the merchant driving sales. With just a few clicks we were able to get valuable business insights!
- Embed the visualizations in your application: Once you're satisfied with the experience, you can quickly embed it into your application with just a few lines of code.
Concluding Thoughts
Incorporating advanced reporting into your Fintech platform is crucial for business growth. It not only improves your customers’ transaction insights, but also allows for you to charge more for advanced features. However, creating and managing custom analytics can be a massive undertaking in terms of time, effort, and finances. Leveraging a third-party platform like Explo can help you meet your business objectives concerning analytics quickly, without significant engineering investment.
Investing in powerful analytics is not just a strategic business decision but also a commitment to your customers. Giving your customers the right insights can empower them to make data-driven decisions, ultimately improving their business efficiency and profitability.
