SÃO PAULO, Brazil. November 11, 2024 - Denodo, a leader in data management, offers solutions that unify and simplify information governance. Among its extensive client portfolio is Sicredi, a cooperative financial institution with over 8.5 million members operating throughout Brazil. Since adopting the Denodo Platform in 2020, Sicredi has experienced transformations that have resulted in increased agility and autonomy for teams working in data management.
Sicredi’s structure consists of five central offices, over 100 cooperatives, more than 2,800 branches, and an administrative center with other companies in the system, collectively employing over 45,000 staff. This scenario generates a vast flow of information daily, with varying degrees of complexity, creating a need for a versatile and efficient data management platform.
“Sicredi has a large volume of data and information from a variety of corporate sources. The challenge has always been governing the entire structure, enabling simple and quick access for technical users, so business users can gain agility in decision-making. Analysts needed to consolidate information for further analysis. This process consumed a lot of time and required additional storage systems, which not only increased IT costs but also failed to deliver the necessary efficiency. In this context, data integration became crucial for strategic decision-making and operational efficiency,” reports Adriano Santos Silva, Financial Planning and BI Manager at Sicredi.
With a history spanning over 120 years, Sicredi offers more than 300 financial products and services, including cards, credit, investments, consortia, and insurance. “To improve workflow throughout the organization, we consolidated siloed data through the Denodo Platform, providing a unified view so that our analysts and other consumers could save time in preparation and business strategy by focusing on data analysis. By introducing data self-service, Denodo significantly enhanced our data governance, reducing delivery time by between 50% and 70%,” explains Adriano Santos Silva.
The Journey of Data Virtualization at Sicredi
The Sicredi Administrative Center (CAS), among other attributes, provides technology services for operations, benefiting both the Sicredi central offices as well as the cooperatives. Within Sicredi’s management area, a variety of systems have been integrated by the Denodo Platform, such as data lakes, data warehouses, flat files (CSV/XLS), web services (internal and external), and other sources.
“Since the project began, we have enabled over 260 dataset developers across various areas of CAS, working with specific databases,” says Rafael Paz, customer success manager at Denodo. So far, more than 1,320 datasets have been created and are available for Sicredi users. This volume has led to the customization of over 11,500 databases that can be queried via the Denodo Platform.
At Sicredi’s central offices and cooperatives, staff perform analyses to support the branches. “Today, the Denodo Platform benefits around 9,000 users within Sicredi. Most of them are not data specialists but business users conducting specific queries on the platform for particular financial operations. It is important to note that only these users, with defined and restricted access, can use the tool, in compliance with the General Data Protection Law (LGPD) and to provide general data security,” explains Rafael Paz.
The Denodo Platform creates a logical data layer that consolidates information from a variety of sources, enabling quick access to data and visibly improving operational efficiency. This way, it is possible to eliminate the storage of duplicated files, mitigate errors and inconsistencies, and integrate data from legacy systems—including modern databases and external sources—creating a consolidated view. “The Denodo Data Catalog also supports other tools, such as Power BI, which is widely used in Sicredi branches, for example,” says Paz. “In addition to the ease and speed of access, the Denodo Platform can adapt to many different situations.”
Sicredi is also leveraging the Denodo Data Catalog to categorize all data with common business terms, enabling users to find relevant data more easily. “There are professionals who serve as focal points in the cooperatives to assist in distributing information to self-service or business users. Today, there are over 150 multiplier users of the platform in the cooperatives,” says Adriano Santos Silva.
About Sicredi
Sicredi is a cooperative financial institution committed to the growth of its members and the development of the regions in which it operates. It has a management model that values the participation of its over 8.5 million members, who act as owners of the business. With more than 2,800 branches, Sicredi is physically present in all Brazilian states and the Federal District, offering a comprehensive range of financial and non-financial solutions.