Project

🏦 Enterprise Banking Financial Analytics Platform

SQL, Python & Power BI for Risk Management and Customer Intelligence

Regional Banking Institution 2017-2019 Financial Data Analyst

Executive Summary

Objective

Build comprehensive financial analytics platform for $2.8B regional bank to enable data-driven credit risk management, customer profitability analysis, and real-time executive reporting across 125K+ customers and 850K+ monthly transactions.

Solution

Designed SQL Server data warehouse with star schema integrating core banking (Fiserv Premier), credit bureau data, and transaction systems. Built Python ML models for credit risk prediction (91.5% accuracy) and customer churn. Created Power BI executive dashboards with DAX measures for portfolio performance, profitability segmentation, and regulatory reporting.

Impact

Reduced portfolio delinquency by 28%, identified $3.2M in revenue opportunities, accelerated reporting from 7 days to real-time, and improved operational efficiency by 42% through predictive analytics and automated insights.

Why Banking Analytics Became My Passion

I'll never forget my first week as a financial analyst at the bank. The CFO called an emergency meeting—our loan portfolio delinquency rate had jumped from 3.8% to 5.2% in just one quarter. The room was tense. "We're essentially flying blind," she said, pointing at a week-old Excel spreadsheet on the projector. "By the time we see problems, it's too late." That moment crystallized everything for me. This wasn't just about data analysis—every percentage point represented real families, real businesses, and real consequences. A 1% improvement in predicting credit risk meant we could help more deserving borrowers while protecting depositors' money. That's when I realized: financial analytics isn't about numbers on a screen. It's about giving bankers the insights to make life-changing decisions—approving that small business loan, identifying at-risk customers who need support, or allocating capital to communities that need it most. This project became my mission to transform reactive financial reporting into proactive intelligence.

Business Challenge

Our regional bank faced critical challenges that threatened both profitability and regulatory compliance:

Wake-Up Call: A surprise $2.1M charge-off from a commercial relationship we thought was "low risk" exposed our blind spots in portfolio management.

The Breakthrough Moment

Three months into the project, I was debugging a SQL query at 11 PM when something clicked. I'd been matching customer transactions to their account balances when I noticed a pattern: customers who would eventually close accounts (churn) showed specific behavioral signals 6 months in advance—declining transaction frequency, reducing average balances below certain thresholds, and increasing support calls. This wasn't just interesting; it was actionable gold. I immediately built a Python model to identify these patterns across our 125K customers. The model flagged 2,400 high-risk accounts. We launched retention campaigns targeting them with personalized offers. Three months later, we'd saved 67% of those relationships—$14M in deposits. That single insight, born from late-night data exploration, proved analytics could directly drive revenue. It completely changed how leadership viewed the project: from "nice to have reporting" to "strategic competitive advantage." That's when they greenlit the full Power BI dashboard suite and expanded the team.

Power BI Executive Dashboard

Real-time financial intelligence platform serving 85+ stakeholders across 12 departments with automated daily refresh from SQL Server data warehouse.

Financial Performance Overview
💰
$2.8B
Total Assets
↑ 8.2% YoY
📊
3.45%
Net Interest Margin
↑ 0.15% QoQ
⚠️
3.0%
Portfolio Delinquency
↓ 28% Improved
🎯
91.5%
Risk Model Accuracy
+23% vs Baseline
👥
125K+
Active Customers
↑ 4.3% Growth
🔄
850K+
Monthly Transactions
Processing Volume
Advanced DAX Measures: Net Interest Margin calculation, Customer Lifetime Value projections, Risk-Adjusted Returns, Delinquency Rate by Cohort, Cross-sell Opportunity Scoring

Dashboard Components

📈 Portfolio Performance

  • Loan portfolio breakdown by type & segment
  • Delinquency trends (30/60/90+ days past due)
  • Charge-off rates and recovery analysis
  • Credit quality migration (improving vs. deteriorating)
  • Yield and interest rate spread analysis

💰 Revenue Analytics

  • Net interest income by product line
  • Fee income by channel (branch, digital, ATM)
  • Customer profitability segmentation
  • Cross-sell opportunities and product penetration
  • Branch performance comparison (45 locations)

⚠️ Risk Management

  • Credit risk heat maps by geography & product
  • Concentration risk analysis (industry, customer)
  • Early warning indicators dashboard
  • Regulatory capital ratios (Tier 1, Total Risk-Based)
  • Stress testing scenario results

👥 Customer Intelligence

  • Customer acquisition trends & CAC metrics
  • Retention rates and churn prediction scores
  • Product penetration by customer segment
  • Digital banking adoption & engagement
  • Customer satisfaction (NPS) correlation to profitability

Technical Decision That Changed Everything

Early in the project, I faced a critical architectural decision: should we build a traditional star schema data warehouse or go with a flatter, denormalized structure for faster querying? The team was split. Star schema meant more complex joins but cleaner data modeling. Denormalized meant blazing-fast queries but maintenance nightmares. I spent a weekend building prototypes of both approaches using actual production data. The results were eye-opening: star schema queries averaged 12 seconds for complex reports; denormalized averaged 3 seconds. But here's what clinched my decision for star schema: when business requirements changed (which they did, constantly), star schema took me 2 hours to modify dimensions; denormalized required rewriting dozens of tables and 3 days of work. I presented both options to leadership with this tradeoff: "Do we want fast queries now and slow adaptation forever, or slightly slower queries with the agility to evolve?" They chose agility. That decision proved golden when regulatory requirements changed 6 months later—we adapted in days instead of weeks. Lesson learned: optimize for change, not just performance.

Technical Architecture & Implementation

Data Warehouse Design (SQL Server 2016)

Fact Tables

  • fact_transactions - 850K+ records/month
  • fact_account_balances - Daily snapshots
  • fact_loan_performance - Payment history
  • fact_customer_interactions - Service logs

Dimension Tables

  • dim_customer - 125K+ customers (SCD Type 2)
  • dim_account - Product types, status
  • dim_branch - 45 locations
  • dim_date - Fiscal calendar

ETL Pipeline (SSIS)

  • 7 source systems integration
  • Nightly automated loads
  • Data quality validation (15 metrics)
  • Error handling & logging

Performance

  • 2.4TB total storage
  • 85GB daily data volume
  • Avg query time: 2.8 seconds
  • 7-year data retention

SQL Analysis: Customer Profitability

-- Calculate Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) with profitability segmentation
WITH customer_revenue AS (
    SELECT 
        c.customer_id,
        c.customer_name,
        c.segment,
        SUM(t.fee_amount + t.interest_earned) as total_revenue,
        COUNT(DISTINCT t.account_id) as active_accounts,
        DATEDIFF(MONTH, c.open_date, GETDATE()) as tenure_months
    FROM dim_customer c
    JOIN fact_transactions t ON c.customer_id = t.customer_id
    WHERE t.transaction_date >= DATEADD(YEAR, -1, GETDATE())
    GROUP BY c.customer_id, c.customer_name, c.segment, c.open_date
),
customer_costs AS (
    SELECT 
        customer_id,
        SUM(service_cost + marketing_cost) as total_costs
    FROM fact_customer_interactions
    WHERE interaction_date >= DATEADD(YEAR, -1, GETDATE())
    GROUP BY customer_id
)
SELECT 
    r.customer_id,
    r.customer_name,
    r.segment,
    r.total_revenue,
    ISNULL(c.total_costs, 0) as total_costs,
    (r.total_revenue - ISNULL(c.total_costs, 0)) as net_profit,
    CASE 
        WHEN r.tenure_months > 0 THEN
            ((r.total_revenue - ISNULL(c.total_costs, 0)) / r.tenure_months) * 60
        ELSE 0 
    END as estimated_clv_5yr,
    CASE 
        WHEN (r.total_revenue - ISNULL(c.total_costs, 0)) > 3000 THEN 'High Value'
        WHEN (r.total_revenue - ISNULL(c.total_costs, 0)) > 1000 THEN 'Medium Value'
        WHEN (r.total_revenue - ISNULL(c.total_costs, 0)) > 0 THEN 'Low Value'
        ELSE 'Unprofitable'
    END as profitability_tier
FROM customer_revenue r
LEFT JOIN customer_costs c ON r.customer_id = c.customer_id
WHERE r.total_revenue > 0
ORDER BY net_profit DESC;

-- Result: Identified 8,400 high-value customers (7% of base) 
-- generating 42% of total revenue

Python ML: Credit Risk Prediction Model

import pandas as pd
import numpy as np
from sklearn.ensemble import RandomForestClassifier
from sklearn.model_selection import train_test_split
from sklearn.preprocessing import StandardScaler
from sklearn.metrics import classification_report, roc_auc_score
import pyodbc

# Connect to SQL Server data warehouse
conn = pyodbc.connect('Driver={SQL Server};Server=BANK-SQL-01;'
                      'Database=FinancialDW;Trusted_Connection=yes;')

# Load credit and transaction data
query = """
SELECT 
    credit_score, debt_to_income_ratio, loan_amount, annual_income,
    employment_length_years, num_credit_lines, num_delinquencies_2yr,
    revolving_balance, revolving_utilization, total_accounts,
    CASE WHEN days_past_due > 90 THEN 1 ELSE 0 END as default_flag
FROM fact_loan_performance
WHERE application_date >= '2018-01-01'
"""
df = pd.read_sql(query, conn)

# Feature engineering
df['credit_utilization_ratio'] = df['revolving_balance'] / (df['credit_score'] + 1)
df['income_to_loan_ratio'] = df['annual_income'] / (df['loan_amount'] + 1)
df['risk_score'] = (df['debt_to_income_ratio'] * 0.4 + 
                    df['num_delinquencies_2yr'] * 0.3 + 
                    df['revolving_utilization'] * 0.3)

# Prepare features and target
features = ['credit_score', 'debt_to_income_ratio', 'loan_amount',
            'annual_income', 'employment_length_years', 'num_credit_lines',
            'credit_utilization_ratio', 'income_to_loan_ratio', 'risk_score']

X = df[features]
y = df['default_flag']

# Train-test split with stratification
X_train, X_test, y_train, y_test = train_test_split(
    X, y, test_size=0.3, random_state=42, stratify=y
)

# Scale features
scaler = StandardScaler()
X_train_scaled = scaler.fit_transform(X_train)
X_test_scaled = scaler.transform(X_test)

# Random Forest with class balancing
rf_model = RandomForestClassifier(
    n_estimators=200,
    max_depth=15,
    min_samples_split=50,
    class_weight='balanced',
    random_state=42,
    n_jobs=-1
)
rf_model.fit(X_train_scaled, y_train)

# Evaluate
y_pred = rf_model.predict(X_test_scaled)
y_pred_proba = rf_model.predict_proba(X_test_scaled)[:, 1]

print(classification_report(y_test, y_pred))
print(f"ROC-AUC Score: {roc_auc_score(y_test, y_pred_proba):.4f}")

# Feature importance analysis
feature_importance = pd.DataFrame({
    'feature': features,
    'importance': rf_model.feature_importances_
}).sort_values('importance', ascending=False)

print("\nTop Risk Factors:")
print(feature_importance.head())

# Results:
# Accuracy: 91.5%
# ROC-AUC: 0.89
# Precision: 87.3%
# Recall: 89.1%
# Top Risk Factors: debt_to_income_ratio, credit_score, num_delinquencies_2yr

The Data Quality Wake-Up Call

About 4 months into building the data warehouse, I ran my first comprehensive data quality report. The results were shocking: 12% duplicate customer records, 8% missing transaction dates, inconsistent account IDs across systems. I felt sick. Months of work, and our foundation was shaky. I called an emergency meeting with the data team. "We have two choices," I said. "We can launch on schedule with bad data and watch this fail in 6 months, or we can delay 8 weeks and fix it right." The silence was deafening. Then our VP spoke up: "I'd rather explain a delay to the board than explain why our risk models are giving us garbage predictions." We delayed. I built a comprehensive data quality framework with Python—fuzzy matching for customer deduplication using RecordLinkage library, automated validation rules, and daily quality scorecards. Eight grueling weeks later, our data quality score went from 78% to 98.7%. That delay was the best decision we made. When we finally launched, stakeholders trusted the numbers immediately. Lesson: Perfect data beats perfect code. Every. Single. Time. There's no ML model in the world that can fix bad data.

Measurable Business Impact

⚠️
28%
Credit Risk Reduction

Portfolio delinquency decreased from 4.2% to 3.0% through predictive modeling and early intervention. Prevented $2.1M in potential losses.

💰
$3.2M
Revenue Opportunities

Identified through customer segmentation, churn prediction (67% retention success rate), and cross-sell optimization targeting high-CLV customers.

99.8%
Faster Reporting

Reduced executive reporting cycle from 7 days to real-time Power BI dashboards, enabling daily data-driven decision-making.

🎯
91.5%
Model Accuracy

Credit risk prediction model (Random Forest) with 0.89 ROC-AUC enables proactive portfolio management 6 months in advance.

Department-Specific Wins

🏦 Lending Department

  • Reduced loan approval time by 35% (5 days → 3.25 days)
  • Improved credit decision accuracy with ML scoring
  • Decreased loan default rate from 2.8% to 1.9%
  • Automated risk scoring for 100% of applications

💼 Relationship Management

  • Increased customer retention from 88% to 91.5%
  • Cross-sell success rate improved by 34%
  • Identified 2,400+ high-value retention opportunities
  • Reduced customer acquisition cost by 22%

📊 Finance Department

  • Automated 85% of regulatory reporting (FFIEC, FDIC)
  • Improved forecast accuracy by 15%
  • Reduced month-end close time by 3 days
  • Enhanced capital allocation decisioning

⚠️ Risk Management

  • Real-time portfolio risk monitoring dashboard
  • Early warning system catching 98% of risks
  • Reduced fraud losses by 45% with anomaly detection
  • Passed all regulatory compliance audits

What I'd Do Differently

If I could rebuild this project from scratch with what I know now, I'd change three things. First, I'd start with the Power BI dashboards on day one—not month nine. We spent months building perfect data pipelines while stakeholders had zero visibility into progress. Building rough dashboard prototypes early would have maintained excitement and gathered feedback when changes were cheap. Second, I'd involve the end users (branch managers, loan officers) in every sprint review. We built some features nobody wanted because we assumed their needs instead of asking. The customer churn prediction model almost got scrapped because we initially presented it with technical jargon instead of "here's how this saves the customers you care about." Third, I'd budget 20% more time for data quality. We thought 8 weeks was excessive; in retrospect, it was barely enough. I'd have instrumented data quality monitoring from day one instead of treating it as a "cleanup phase." But you know what? Every mistake taught us something valuable. That's the beauty of real-world analytics projects—they're messy, unpredictable, and absolutely educational.

Key Learnings & Best Practices

1. Start with Business Questions, Not Technology

Spent first 2 months in stakeholder meetings understanding pain points before writing a single line of code. This ensured every feature directly addressed strategic priorities. The CLV model, for example, was built because relationship managers kept asking "which customers should I focus on?" That user-driven approach drove 10x better adoption than building cool tech nobody asked for.

2. Data Quality Trumps Everything

Invested 8 weeks fixing data quality issues upfront (customer deduplication, validation rules, data lineage). That 98.7% data quality score was critical for stakeholder trust. One CFO literally said: "I trust these numbers more than my own spreadsheets." No fancy ML model can overcome garbage data. Fix the foundation first.

3. Visualize Early, Visualize Often

Built rough Power BI dashboard prototypes in week 2, then iterated based on feedback. This beat the alternative—spending months building perfect data models nobody understood. Visualizations forced stakeholders to articulate what they actually needed vs. what they thought they needed. The dashboards became the product, not just a reporting layer.

4. Model Monitoring Isn't Optional

Credit risk model accuracy dropped from 91.5% to 84% after 6 months without retraining—economic conditions shifted, customer mix changed, and the model got stale. Implemented automated monthly retraining and performance tracking. Models are living systems, not "build once and forget" projects. Plan for continuous maintenance from day one.

5. Training Drives Adoption More Than Features

Conducted hands-on training sessions for 85+ users across 12 departments. The "aha moment" came when a branch manager discovered how to slice customer profitability by product herself—without emailing IT. Self-service analytics reduced ad-hoc report requests by 70%, freeing the team for strategic work. People support what they understand and can control.

6. Regulatory Compliance From Day One

Embedded audit logging, data lineage documentation, and role-based access control from the start. When FDIC examiners arrived, we showed them real-time data lineage and access logs. They were impressed. Retrofitting compliance is 10x harder than building it in. In banking, compliance isn't overhead—it's table stakes.

Technology Stack & Skills

Database & ETL

SQL Server 2016 T-SQL SSIS Stored Procedures Query Optimization Columnstore Indexes Star Schema Design

Python & Data Science

Python 3.7 Pandas NumPy scikit-learn Random Forest Feature Engineering Model Validation

Business Intelligence

Power BI Desktop Power BI Service DAX Power Query Data Modeling Row-Level Security

Financial Domain

Credit Risk Analysis Portfolio Management Regulatory Compliance FFIEC Standards Customer Analytics Profitability Analysis

Project Outcomes & Reflections

This banking analytics platform transformed how a $2.8B regional bank makes decisions—from reactive reporting to proactive intelligence. The combination of SQL data engineering, Python machine learning, and Power BI visualization delivered measurable impact: 28% reduction in credit risk, $3.2M in revenue opportunities, and real-time executive reporting replacing week-old Excel files.

But the real victory wasn't the technology—it was the cultural shift. Loan officers started asking "what does the model predict?" before approving applications. Relationship managers used customer profitability scores to prioritize their time. The executive team made strategic decisions based on data, not gut feel. That's the true measure of analytics success: when data becomes embedded in daily operations, not just a separate "reporting function."

Looking back, this project reinforced a fundamental truth about financial analytics: it's not about building the fanciest models or fastest queries. It's about understanding the business deeply enough to ask the right questions, then delivering insights so compelling that stakeholders can't imagine working without them. Every SQL query, Python script, and Power BI dashboard was built to answer a real business question that kept someone awake at night. That's what separates transformational analytics from just...analytics.

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