Domo platform a difference-maker for check guarantee vendor
Ingo Money succeeded with the analytics specialist's suite after years of struggling to gain insights from spreadsheets and a failed attempt to modernize with another BI vendor.
The Domo analytics platform freed Ingo Money from being mired in a morass of massive spreadsheets.
Based in Alpharetta, Ga., Ingo Money is a check guarantee vendor whose platform enables customers to manage money faster than banks. Using a risk assessment process, the company lets users cash checks, track payments and make outbound payments in a secure, guaranteed way without having to wait the customary time that traditional financial institutions require.
Among its many customers are insurance and gaming companies, as well as restaurants, all of which send and receive heavy volumes of payments.
Domo, meanwhile, is an analytics vendor based in American Fork, Utah, whose platform enables customers to analyze data and build applications that help users make data-informed decisions.
While a midsize company, Ingo Money collects a significant amount of data, including information about each individual transaction and the users making the transactions. In addition, much of that data is sensitive information such as bank account and credit card numbers that if leaked could result in financial harm to users -- and ruin Ingo Money's reputation as a trusted platform for financial transactions.
"We consider ourselves a money mobility company," said Dan Rex, Ingo Money's CFO. "Along with that comes a ton of sensitive information -- every payment is associated with someone's personal information. Keeping that secure is probably our No. 1 priority."
As worldwide data volume exploded, the amount of data that Ingo Money collected similarly increased. Eventually, gleaning any insights from huge amounts of data in Excel spreadsheets became too much for a small data team to handle.
Around 2014, the company knew it needed something different -- something more advanced that could free it from spreadsheets while providing security that ensures sensitive information remains private.
The problem
A decade ago, one of Ingo Money's main uses of data was to track the performance of representatives in its risk center, which is where risk assessments related to transactions happen in the moment so that decisions can be made whether to approve or deny payments.
Other uses were related to analyzing the company's general operations.
All that information was stored in a database. To view it, the team exported the data into Excel spreadsheets. Those spreadsheets, however, could only handle a month of data at a time, and they contained millions of rows.
There were these massive spreadsheets that we had to export. My job was to crunch those numbers in those spreadsheets, and it was painful. It would take forever to not only pull the report, but to glean what we could out of those spreadsheets.
Shannon MaioloOperations analyst, Ingo Money
Analysis had to be done manually, according to Shannon Maiolo, an operations analyst at Ingo Money. As a result, garnering any insight was arduous.
"There were these massive spreadsheets that we had to export," she said. "My job was to crunch those numbers in those spreadsheets, and it was painful. It would take forever to not only pull the report, but to glean what we could out of those spreadsheets."
Discovering trends over time was particularly difficult, given that Ingo Money could only analyze one month of data in each spreadsheet, Maiolo continued. So was adapting as new issues arose related to fraud detection and other complex processes.
"Often, we wouldn't catch issues until far after they had begun," Maiolo said. "We really needed a way to catch fraud rings faster and more efficiently so we wouldn't be heavily impacted."
One of Maiolo's directives was to create scorecards to analyze the performance of each of the representatives in the risk center. She tried developing templates to simplify creating and analyzing the scorecards. Even that was difficult to do using spreadsheets.
Something needed to change or Ingo Money would suffer consequences, from being defrauded by increasingly sophisticated cybercriminals to suffering from inefficiencies because data related to employee and operational performance was difficult to track.
The way out
A modern analytics platform was the logical choice for Ingo Money, given its growing reliance on data. In 2014, the company tried one.
At the time, some of the more popular analytics platforms included Power BI from Microsoft, MicroStrategy, Qlik, SAS and Tableau. Ingo Money experimented with one of those that was then considered advanced.
It did not go well, according to Maiolo.
"Before Domo, an attempt was made to use [a different] tool that was bad," she said. "This was before I was at Ingo Money, but my understanding is that it did not go well, so it wound up being abandoned."
Following that aborted attempt to move from Excel spreadsheets to a modern analytics platform -- which lasted about a year -- Ingo Money was unsure what to do next. Then someone suggested Domo's analytics platform to the executive staff.
Ingo Money, a check guarantee vendor whose platform enables users to digitally send and receive payments, has modernized its analytics operations using Domo.
After what had transpired with the first attempt at moving on from spreadsheets, trepidation arose. Nevertheless, after experimenting with Domo, Ingo Money adopted the vendor's business intelligence platform in 2015.
"There was a lot of hesitation," Maiolo said. "But once we got into Domo, we were like, 'This is great -- this is exactly what we need.' It was very easy to get started. That was what gave us the confidence to move forward."
That ease of use, especially when getting started, is intended, according to Ben Schein, Domo's senior vice president of product.
Some data management and analytics vendors cater mostly to large enterprises. Domo, however, has customers of all sizes, including smaller companies that don't have large data teams with deep expertise. The ease with which those companies can get started with Domo's platform makes it an attractive option.
"[Small and medium-sized businesses use] Domo because it combines enterprise-grade analytics with an easy-to-use, cloud-native and mobile-friendly platform that doesn't require the expense of a large IT team," Schein said.
Ingo Money's expectations were low after years of trying to extract insights from spreadsheets and then going through a failed experiment with a prominent analytics platform. At first, just three Ingo Money employees -- including Maiolo -- experimented with Domo.
"It was so simple to get something going," Maiolo said. "It didn't require a lot of training. It was user-friendly and self-explanatory."
Once Maiolo and her cohorts found quick success, Ingo Money gradually expanded its use of Domo. Now, about 60% of the company's employees use the platform regularly, with its most widespread use coming from its risk center and customer service department.
In addition, all executive reports are developed using Domo, according to Rex.
"Everything we look at from a month-end standpoint and everything we send out to our board of directors is driven by Domo," he said.
Results
Now, Ingo Money uses Domo in connection with Microsoft SQL Server, where the company stores much of its internally created data. In addition, Ingo Money uses Domo's platform to pull data from internally developed systems where payroll and other data is created as well as external applications such as HubSpot that track sales data.
Because Ingo Money's adoption of Domo has been a 10-year process, it can't directly compare operations before and after using the analytics platform to determine its effect.
"There wasn't a formal process where we measured things, implemented and then measured again," Maiolo said.
However, when comparing the time it took to manually pore through spreadsheets to extract information and garner insights with the time it takes to analyze data using Domo's platform, the impact has been significant, she continued. Beyond basic reporting, Ingo Money now uses Domo to automate certain processes that previously had to be performed manually.
"It has saved so much time and energy," Maiolo said. "There are a lot of manual processes that go into what we do."
Most notably, risk assessment is a previously manual process that Ingo Money has been able to automate, in part, using Domo. By filtering aspects of the review process through Domo's platform and using it as a calculator, Ingo Money has been able to streamline the process of assessing a transaction's risk, speeding its approval -- or denial -- and making representatives more efficient.
"It takes a bunch of hours off people's plates," Maiolo said. "When I'm working with someone to automate a process, I tell them, 'Let Domo do the dumb stuff so you can do the smart stuff.' Anything that's mindless, Domo can do it."
Meanwhile, because Domo has done a good job of relieving workers of repetitive, time-consuming tasks, employees within Ingo Money trust Domo and have expanded their use of the platform.
"The biggest money-saver is the time people save by no longer having to do those tedious and time-consuming processes," Maiolo said.
More tangibly, Rex estimated that his own use of Domo's platform saves him from having to hire at least one extra employee. In some departments, such as auditing, two people can do what would otherwise require five or six employees.
"I would be surprised if it saves us less than seven to 10 bodies on an annual basis," Rex said.
Beyond efficiency and cost savings, Domo enables Ingo Money to keep sensitive data secure.
The vendor's platform encrypts sensitive data, both when it is moving between systems and when it is at rest. It also provides data governance tools that enable system administrators to put in access controls and other measures that guarantee data security is in place, according to Domo's Schein.
Wish list
While Domo has been a transformative technology for Ingo Money, it is not a perfect platform.
One shortcoming is that it doesn't provide much in the way of training materials for people who don't have broad swaths of free time to experiment and figure out how to use new tools as they are developed and launched, according to Maiolo.
Based on what it has been able to figure out, Ingo Money has gotten a lot out of Domo, but it could potentially benefit from even more if there were a quick way to learn about new capabilities.
"Domo has a bunch of really cool features that I have not been able to get my hands in," Maiolo said. "I'd like more training materials for people like me who don't have a lot of time to just figure it out -- better documentation in that regard."
From a technology perspective, it would be beneficial if it were easier to input data through Domo and export data from Domo to other platforms, she continued.
"Really, it's more improving things that are already there than adding new things," Maiolo said.
While Domo might not offer as many training materials as Maiolo would like, the vendor does provide dedicated account managers and around-the-clock technical support. And for those with the time to attend, it offers Domo University for users to learn more about the vendor's platform, Schein said.
All means of support, plus Domo's user community where users can exchange ideas, are meant to help customers scale as their needs grow, he added.
One thing Ingo Money hopes to do more of is automate more processes, according to Rex. And while the company hasn't always been able to take advantage of Domo's innovations, new AI capabilities that have been developed over the past couple of years will help toward that end.
"We're continuing to leverage automation, so some of the new AI capabilities within the Domo platform are going to be very big for us," Rex said.
Use cases targeted for more automation include monthly reporting and forecasting, he continued. Rather than manually updating reports with new data and trying to reach insights, AI-driven automation could enable Rex to click a button to not only update reports, but also receive advice on what the new data means.
"I love spending my time doing the analysis and not the data manipulation, so I'm excited for that to kick off," he said.
Plans for expansion
More automation is just one way Ingo Money plans to expand its use of Domo's platform, according to Maiolo.
One possibility is for the company's development team to take advantage of Domo's App Studio to build analytics applications that can be embedded in business processes to provide users with data within workflows. Another is to use Domo's data visualization capabilities to create graphics that enable deeper analysis than reports, she said.
Still another is an attempt to monetize some of the data that Ingo Money has collected and supplies to customers. The company currently provides cards containing key information to certain customers monthly, Rex said. An opportunity exists to expand that effort by providing more data on those cards and by offering cards to more customers.
"Data is not free, and data is the most powerful thing you can have in organization," he said. "Our customers always want the next level, so I think there's a big opportunity to leverage what we're building in Domo to increase what we can give our customers."
Eric Avidon is a senior news writer for Informa TechTarget and a journalist with more than 25 years of experience. He covers analytics and data management.
