TransUnion

Business Challenge

TransUnion’s vision was to transform its technology to have cutting edge capabilities that would allow for nimble pivoting and to identify trends and build innovative solutions, allowing its customers to stay ahead of those trends. A key to achieving these goals was to deploy technology that would provide TransUnion’s analysts and data scientists with greater flexibility, self-service access to full data volumes, and big data insight discovery capabilities.

Analytics Solution

TransUnion launched a new self-service analytics platform leveraging the MapR Platform to provide its customers with market insights and historical perspectives to inform their risk strategies. Different modules cater to different types of customers. The first TransUnion products leveraging the MapR Platform are based on their consumer credit database. They use MapR Direct Access NFS to ingest structured data. Once inside, the data is standardized in Parquet for interoperability. The Hive data warehouse does data preparation for Apache Drill. The custom Java web app portal integrates with a Tableau backend server. Drill is the main SQL engine driving the interactive experience for Tableau.

Impact

This powerful self-service analytics solution engages TransUnion customers in an entirely new way. In the past, customer queries would be answered with a static PDF. If customers had additional questions, they would have to spend time on the phone with an analyst. The entire process could take multiple weeks. With this new platform, TransUnion is allowing customers direct access to its content, but with the power of an analytical platform and a team of experts behind it. Additional areas of impact include:

• Self-guided research

• Agile product development

• Low risk of new business ventures

• Staggering cost savings