9/24/2017 Why we don’t have a Business Intelligence team at TransferWise

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Nov 23, 2015 · 6 min read

Why we don’t have a Business Intelligence

team at TransferWise

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9/24/2017 Why we don’t have a Business Intelligence team at TransferWise

By Je McClelland — TransferWise Lead Analyst

At TransferWise we don’t have a Business Intelligence team, but that

doesn’t mean we don’t have business intelligence. In fact, our work is
incredibly data-driven. The way our analysts operate is pretty unique —
it works. Our aim at TransferWise is to ensure that analysis translates
into meaningful impact. Fast.

The analyst’s greatest fear isn’t what you’d expect

Like all analysts, we worry about getting the numbers right. But our
greatest fear isn’t messing up a formula — it’s a much worse scenario:
working tirelessly to produce cutting-edge insights, only for them to be
ignored by the rest of the company.

When hard work and interesting conclusions don’t translate into

meaningful impact, things can get pretty frustrating, pretty quickly.
This scenario usually starts with the best intentions. An analyst will
crack a burning problem, and send round a ashy new dashboard or
mind-blowing presentation — but for some reason, after reading these
insights and clapping the analyst on the back, no-one does anything
di erently. Did no-one understand the information? Did they simply

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9/24/2017 Why we don’t have a Business Intelligence team at TransferWise

not act on it? Or perhaps the wrong questions were asked in the rst
place?

With this in mind, we organise our analysts di erently

At TransferWise we don’t silo our analysts into a separate ‘Business
Intelligence’ department, as if thinking can somehow be separated from
doing. Instead, all analysts work within truly operational teams —
sitting side-by-side with product managers and engineers. Whether it’s
within our operations, currencies or our performance marketing team,
the analyst’s goal is to help their team maximise impact. (At
TransferWise we work in autonomous teams — read more about that
here).

Since a team’s impact is measured by its chosen KPI, an analyst’s goal is

the same as everyone else’s in the team: do whatever is needed to have
a positive and sustainable impact on this KPI. This guiding star helps
analysts prioritise their work — the clearer the end-goal, the easier it is
to tell whether a piece of work is having an impact, and the quicker, less
impactful work can be de-prioritised.

The o ence is where we have an impact

Analysts are free to work on whatever projects they believe will ‘move
the needle’ on their team’s KPI. One piece of guidance we give at
TransferWise, is to avoid getting stuck on ‘defence’. We see this as
setting up the data infrastructure, preparing and running reports,
xing bugs, or adding endless new slices and metrics to dashboards.
While it is essential to spend some time on defence, we nd that often
this is not where our analysts and data scientists have the most impact.

We prefer our analysts to be on the ‘o ence’. For us, this means using
data to nd novel opportunities to make TransferWise better for our
customers. The main challenge here is ensuring that any ndings
translate into action. But since our analysts are deeply embedded
within their teams, often the whole team help to prioritise these
‘o ence’ analyses. This means they’re waiting with anticipation to use
the result — meaning very little work is ever wasted.

Staying networked is important

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Some of our data scientists at a recent team hackathon

Despite working in separate teams, our data scientists are still

networked. We learn from each other, share insights, help each other
with the most di cult problems and rotate around teams. One way we
share knowledge is with regular ‘analyst hackathon’ days. We gather in
one place and collaborate on ‘o ence’ topics that cut across many
teams. Hackathon success is measured by the positive impact any
ndings have for our customers.

Helping teams help themselves

An important part of not having a Business Intelligence department, is
ensuring that analysts do not become ‘bottlenecks’ for data. At
TransferWise, our aim is that all individuals are able to use data to
answer questions — with or without the help of our analysts. We make
our data freely available to everyone that wants it, and train them in
how to use it e ectively. In this way, our analysts act as mentors, and
use their expertise to take on only the toughest questions.

In fact, everyone needs to be data uent at TransferWise. Our Product

Managers, developers, marketeers, Operations and Customer Support
agents all need to be able to work with their own data. As a result, no
team waits around for someone else to ‘run the numbers’. A happy
byproduct of this is that our analysts spend almost no time performing
tedious data pulls or updating reports for others. This enables our
network to be extremely lean (currently 8 of 500 employees) and
focussed on high-impact work every day.

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9/24/2017 Why we don’t have a Business Intelligence team at TransferWise

So, does it work?

Yes, it does.

To add some colour, here’s a recent example of impactful analysis from

our Experience team, who focus on making the experience of moving
money convenient and hassle-free.

We do our best to deliver a seamless online experience for customers,

but sometimes they need to get in touch with us. Understandably, when
a customer has sent us hundreds or thousands of pounds, euros or
dollars, they expect their queries to be dealt with quickly, simply and
transparently. So Marko, an analyst within the Experience team,
decided to gure out how his team could improve the experience of
those customers that we need to speak to.

The Experience team tracked how many of our transfers require a

manual intervention on our side, but Marko realised that this wasn’t
really what customers cared about. What matters to our customers, is
whether we get their transfer around the world quickly and reliably,
ideally without requiring any extra work from them.

So Marko did some investigating, and realised that only a small % of

transfers require our Customer Support team to reach out to customers,
but a few tricky transactions take up the majority of the time spent
calling customers. Marko was able to list the major reasons we needed
to contact our customers, and took these to his team.

Marko’s team were awaiting his ndings, and together they worked
through the list and identi ed the “quick wins” for our customers. One
of the main reasons we need to call our customers, is that sometimes
they transfer us a di erent amount to the one we were expecting (a
‘mismatch’). The Experience team quickly built the option to resolve
these mismatches through ‘self service’ online, removing the need for a
lengthy phone call.

The adoption of this self-service facility by customers was rapid (chart

below). Marko and the Experience team can clearly see the positive
impact they’ve had for customers, and move on to tackling the other
items on Marko’s list. This type of great result happens every day in
teams that are organised for impact.

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9/24/2017 Why we don’t have a Business Intelligence team at TransferWise

Organising for impact
‘Business Intelligence’ is only valuable if something happens as a result.
If nothing changes for your customers, then there’s simply no point.

At TransferWise, each team builds business intelligence into everything

they do. This allows analysts and data scientists to focus on the
toughest questions: those that have the greatest impact for their teams
and our customers.

If you’re interested in joining our lean, embedded, impact-focused

analytics team, please check out our jobs page.

. . .

For more from the TransferWise team, follow our Medium

publication TransferWise Ideas.

You can also follow TransferWise on Twitter here.

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