Each year, more and more U.S. consumers are abandoning in-person bank branches in favor of digital banking. A survey from the American Bankers Association found just nine percent of Americans cited bank branches as the go-to method of managing their money; whereas mobile and online take the majority share. Banks need to adapt to consumer preferences while ensuring their tech and tools are compliant and secure.
Lawson Bonds, vice president of development and data solutions at Arkansas Federal Credit Union (AFCU), sought to bring digital innovation to banking. With over 150,000 members and $2 billion in assets, AFCU had an opportunity to improve member experiences with better technology.
Read on to learn how Lawson and his team transformed manual, inefficient processes to make the credit union’s customers happier while freeing up his developers’ time.
AFCU analysts relied on internal business intelligence (BI)—tools and processes to analyze data and provide insights for better decision making—to monitor new client referrals, checking accounts, IRAs, loans and other critical customer information. SAP gathered the customer data, but lacked an efficient way of displaying it. Business analysts downloaded the reports in an Excel spreadsheet, which then had to be distributed to various banking divisions within the credit union, resulting in a highly manual process that slowed down the entire team.
In an ideal world, the BI team would have data from every different source in one dashboard. These analysts were stuck context-switching between tools for reporting and handling events, including high-priority scenarios like outages or updates to security policies. While SAP got them 60% of the way there, customizing it into the type of dashboard they needed wasn’t going to be easy and felt like more of a challenge than it was worth.
Lawson’s programming team tried to build a solution to connect systems, vendors, and data, but they soon realized that it’d take too much time to get what he needed built and deployed. He also tried pulling data and reports in SAP on a schedule, but users still had to wait for their data to arrive before gathering insights. Lawson even purchased new software to fill the gaps, but struggled with customizing these tools to solve problems specific to AFCU’s business. It quickly became clear that the team needed a custom solution to get the fully unified and automated BI system and reporting they wanted.
Lawson needed to build a single, secure platform that would eliminate the toil of manual tasks while offering sufficient security to host his reports—a solution that could ultimately replace SAP as his reporting software.
The developers and analysts on his team were already skilled in JavaScript, SQL, Python, and familiar with various APIs, so Lawson wasn’t interested in a no-code tool that wouldn’t allow for inline code or customizations. The solution needed to be scalable, maintainable, and flexible so his team could move applications to production quickly and iterate often. Lawson also weighed security factors like the ability to self-host in AFCU’s infrastructure behind their firewall.
Once he discovered Retool, Lawson approached exploration methodically, starting by building a proof of concept to secure buy-in and alignment from his team. He verified that Retool integrated with his various data sources, supported data automations, and that its UI builder was flexible and customizable enough for his needs. With the help of Retool’s solutions engineering team, he quickly spun up several proof of concepts to present to his peers.
With the functional aspects validated, the next step was ensuring Retool met AFCU's stringent security requirements. Its enterprise-grade security features—like self-hosted deployments, built-in audit logs, and granular permission controls—gave him and his stakeholders peace of mind that the tools his team builds will remain secure and compliant with regulations. With both functionality and security concerns addressed, Lawson and his team were ready to begin implementing their custom reporting platform.
In just two weeks, Lawson and his team developed an app analysts can use to manage customer referrals and view referral reports. This application now serves over 200 employees daily, where both client-facing employees and analysts can log in, create and manage customer referrals to financial products, and view a summary dashboard that visualizes referral statistics by status, location, type, and time. Client-facing employees could create and track the status of their referrals, and analysts could run reports and view analytics on those referrals.
The app’s navigation sidebar dynamically updates whenever an analyst or client-facing employee is granted or revoked access, and only specific users have access to the summary dashboard or referrals management page. The team used Retool’s built-in permissions like role-based access controls, permissions groups, role level security, and user attributes to implement these key security features. When working with external sources that required authorizations, the team used Retool as a base layer, and wrote custom code on top of it to handle authentication before integrating with external sources.
To minimize manual work when creating new referrals, Lawson’s team integrated with their Snowflake data warehouse and implemented a search bar that looks up members by name and populates the referral with information like member ID, email, and phone number. Once a referral is submitted, users with access can manage referrals and update the status of each request. Lawson’s team wrote custom validation checks to ensure that details like account numbers were verified before sending the request. The team implemented data validation using a mix of Retool’s out-of-the-box capabilities, external APIs, and SQL—ensuring data quality and integrity at every point.
When it came to data visualization, the development team’s skill set really shined. By using Plotly to extend Retool’s data visualization capabilities, they were able to transform raw referral data into actionable business insights. The summary dashboard displays referrals by status, type, location, and time, and offers a detailed view into each data insight. This means AFCU branch managers and business leadership can get a high-level overview of all referrals coming into the organization and explore more detailed views for further insights.
Lawson and his team took full advantage of Retool’s flexibility to build a fully customized reporting platform—without building from scratch, hiring more developers, or outsourcing. In terms of timing, the sidebar—a task that could have occupied an entire full-stack team for months—was developed by a single person in just one month.
This referrals platform was just the start of his team’s journey to bring AFCU’s BI under one roof. The app demonstrated that AFCU can connect and integrate data from various sources while providing a full-service experience where analysts and customer-facing employees can manage referrals, view analytics, and generate reports—effectively eliminating the team’s manual toil.
Building and scaling this suite of apps from scratch would have been a significant undertaking, but Lawson and his programming team were able to deploy and deliver six weeks earlier than projected, saving them $15k in the process. They’re now in a phase of scaling, maintaining, and supporting their 200+ users.
“Utilizing reusable components and guided by Retool’s engineering team, we streamlined workflow efficiency and connected several systems into one user interface. We can [now] build applications to automate manual processes and replace existing systems, making the ROI work more in our favor than buying several solutions to solve one problem.” —Lawson Bonds
The team increased their productivity
Retool allowed Lawson’s team of developers to be more productive when building internal solutions. Instead of writing endless lines of HTML, boilerplate code, and tests, Lawson and his team of developers were able to build the entire platform in just two weeks. This freed up his programming team to work on more critical tasks like automations and intelligent document processing (IDP).
The business intelligence and data warehouse teams also felt the productivity gains. By connecting their previously disconnected systems, they were able to shift their focus to building dashboards and ETLs that easily integrate into Retool.
Lawson also highlights that developers of skill sets can successfully contribute to building: “I can put system analysts and programmers on projects to move several items forward simultaneously.”
Customer-facing employees and analysts improved operational efficiency
AFCU transformed its disjointed manual referral and reporting processes into a streamlined, self-serve platform. Customer-facing employees and analysts can now create, save, and modify reports independently, as well as take direct actions—such as updating information across multiple systems connected via REST APIs. Ultimately, with a more efficient process and custom platform to get work done, AFCU is more productive and better able to help the business, its customers, and the community.
AFCU saved on SaaS costs
By building a BI solution in Retool, Lawson was able to decommission one of the tools used for SAP reporting. That decision saved AFCU $43,000 by the end of 2024—with more savings on the horizon as his team builds more applications with Retool.
“We are going to replace several things straight up with Retool. These would include other BI tooling, organization ticket system, intranet, Excel processes, and automations on a timer to allow us to move to instant automation and real-time validations,” says Lawson.
Over the course of five months, Lawson and his team developed a system mapping application that integrates Retool, AM5 charts, and Sigma for more advanced use cases. Something they delivered 10 weeks earlier than expected which saved them an estimated $23k in developer’s time.
This solution marks a significant step towards AFCU's ultimate goal: unifying all their systems under one Retool-based roof for more efficient and accurate reporting by entirely replacing SAP with Retool. The streamlined development that would come from replacing SAP with a custom BI system in Retool is estimated to save them $48k and drive faster decision making and operational efficiency across the company.
“Our organization is super excited about what Retool brings to the table, allowing us to keep up with constant change and deliver better client experiences.” His advice for engineering leaders at other banks? “Embrace that change. Ask yourself how well your systems work now, where your organization is going in the next five years, and what you can do to ensure that your systems keep up.”
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