Data Analytics in the financial sector - The process of implementing a Business Intelligence data reporting platform through a Qlik Sense application

KPMG - Data AnalyticsThe process of understanding data and presenting it graphically or visually is more commonly known as data visualization. We are currently in the big data era, when data has been referred to as a business's raw material. The more data that is gathered and examined, the more equipped the business will be to make important decisions. It has grown more challenging for organizations to extract critical information from the available data, nevertheless, as a result of the massive expansion in data, the significance of data visualization becomes apparent in this context. In order to communicate the information clearly and effectively, data visualization helps people comprehend the meaning of data by condensing and displaying a large amount of data in a straightforward and understandable style. Nowadays, it is essential for companies to be able to process the enormous amount of data at their disposal in order to make decisions that improve and increase business efficiency, thus creating a competitive advantage in the medium to long term period. In the context of a large bank organisation, such as the client of the project described in this thesis, it is crucial to create meaningful visualisations that focus on key values and data in order to enable the final user, which often has little experience with business analytics tools, to interpret meaningful statistics in an effortless manner. In this environment, the KPMG Lighthouse centre is able to give customers the finest digital solution for their organization, thanks to the dedicated team of data scientists, engineers, and technology experts among which this study was conducted. This paper is therefore the result of a project carried out in an enterprise environment in which a set of data analysis applications were developed for a client in the finance sector. The purpose of this thesis is to describe the process that led to the final product, with particular focus on the technical steps required prior to the implementation of the final visualisation report. The ultimate goal is to shed light on the importance of a correct handling of the data and moreover how data visualisation can be a fundamental tool in the hands of the organisation. Starting from the motivation behind the project, moving on to a description of the technical steps of data collection and storage, and finally describing the implementation of graphical analysis, this thesis aims at following the whole process of development of a reporting application. The customer's needs, central to the whole development process, are taken into consideration throughout development as they greatly influence the final production of the reporting.