USAA builds consistency by unifying risk analysis data in Tableau

Since 1922, USAA has provided insurance and financial services to military and civilian members. As with many businesses, mitigating operational and product life cycle risks at USAA is essential to maintaining efficiency, member satisfaction, and growth. Risk analysts use data from multiple systems—including issue management, gaps analysis, operational assessments, customer relationship management, business intelligence services, and EGRC (enterprise governance, risk management, and compliance)—to help ensure that USAA is meeting its key performance metrics.

But having data in multiple places was a risk in itself, and the process USAA used for sorting data and building reports varied from person to person and team to team. If reports were created using different data filters, or data that was pulled at different points in time, the findings varied—leading to contradictory or misconstrued results. These inconsistencies were problematic for decision makers, including executives, boards of directors, partners, and federal governing agencies. Further down in the organization, it was also difficult for business team leaders and individual workers to make timely, informed decisions.

Using Tableau, USAA can now connect to all of their data sources and create dashboards and visualizations based on this newly centralized data hub. Tableau enables USAA data workers to quickly build reports for internal and external stakeholders, either by exporting visualizations to Microsoft PowerPoint for executive audiences, or by publishing links in Tableau for other analysts and first-line users. Drawing the data from a unified, “single source of truth” helps USAA maintain consistency and accuracy across all reports.

Speed and agility of information sharing have also improved dramatically. By unifying data and streamlining reporting with Tableau, analysts can now prepare reports in seconds, where previous processes could take up to one month and not be as consistent or accurate. Workers at all levels of the organization can now make faster, better decisions, and feel more confident that the data they're using is the right data. With Tableau, USAA has begun building a data-driven culture throughout its workforce and partner ecosystem. Now, every individual and team is using data to build success across the organization.