Key Takeaways
- Financial services face unique pressures: Legacy systems, strict compliance requirements, siloed data, and rising expectations for AI-ready insights all challenge banks, insurers, and fintechs.
- Coalesce simplifies modernization: With built-in governance, flexible automation, and support for modern cloud platforms, Coalesce helps finserv organizations move faster without compromising trust.
- Real-world results: Customers like United Community Bank, WSECU, Group 1001, Q2, and Hub International have cut costs, accelerated innovation, and improved data culture with Coalesce.
- Business and cultural impact: Beyond efficiency gains, Coalesce fosters collaboration between technical and business teams, creating trusted, governed data that fuels smarter decisions.
Financial services organizations—from banks and credit unions to insurers and fintech providers—face mounting pressure to modernize their data practices. Between regulatory requirements, customer expectations for real-time insights, and the complexity of legacy infrastructure, data has become both a liability and a strategic advantage.
At Coalesce, we’ve seen firsthand how financial services (finserv) leaders use our platform to turn data into a competitive edge. By automating transformations, cataloging data, embedding governance, and enabling collaboration across teams, Coalesce helps these organizations unlock insights faster, reduce risk, and create lasting cultural change around data.
This article explores common challenges facing the industry, why leading firms trust Coalesce, and the measurable impact they’ve achieved—drawing on real-world stories from customers like United Community Bank, WSECU, Group 1001, Q2, and others.
What challenges do finserv data teams face?
Despite vast investments in data, many financial services organizations still struggle with:
- Legacy infrastructure and technical debt: Decades-old data warehouses and on-premises systems slow down innovation.
- Regulatory and compliance complexity: From Basel III to Dodd-Frank, finserv data must be transparent, accurate, and auditable at all times.
- Siloed teams and fragmented data: Data trapped across business units leads to inefficiency and inconsistent reporting.
- Rising expectations for analytics and AI: Leaders need real-time, governed data to fuel customer insights, fraud detection, and AI-driven innovation.
- Escalating costs of manual processes: Traditional ETL/ELT approaches can’t keep up with scale, leading to ballooning engineering workloads.
Why do financial services data teams choose Coalesce?
Built-in governance
Financial institutions can’t compromise on trust. With Coalesce’s column-aware architecture, data teams enforce standards and governance at scale while staying agile. For example, a large regional bank implemented a Snowflake Data Vault with Coalesce to simplify audits and regulatory reporting—delivering transparency without adding manual overhead.
Speed and efficiency
Time is money in financial services. With Coalesce’s blend of visual and code-first flexibility, data teams are seeing project timelines shrink dramatically. From building complex data pipelines to automating documentation, teams save time and can move faster at enterprise scale without accruing tech debt.
At United Community Bank, what once took weeks of manual wrangling now happens in hours—accelerating innovation and improving customer service. “Coalesce’s simple interface lowers the barrier of entry to get started, and that ease of use is a great accelerator for us,” says Andrew Crisp, Director of Enterprise Data Services at United Community Bank.
Cloud modernization
Legacy systems hold many firms back, but Coalesce was built for modern data platforms like Snowflake, Databricks, and Microsoft Fabric. Group 1001 leveraged Coalesce to move insurance data off outdated infrastructure and into the cloud, gaining a foundation to support new product innovation while keeping costs in check. “We’ve completely rewritten all the fundamental processes and the platform from scratch,” says Gu Xie, Head of Data Engineering & Data Analytics at Group 1001. “We have Snowflake as our data store, we have Fivetran replicating our pipelines over to Snowflake, and we’re using Coalesce for data transformation.”
Collaboration
Data transformation isn’t just technical—it’s cultural. Coalesce enables engineers, analysts, and business users to collaborate in one environment. At Washington State Employees Credit Union, this meant business teams could finally trust their data, breaking down silos and creating a shared data culture that drives smarter, faster decision-making across the credit union. “We really appreciate being able to point people to one location, where we can be confident everyone will get the same answer,” says Joe Horton, Data Architect at WSECU.
Real finserv data transformation success stories
United Community Banks accelerates innovation and AI-readiness
United Community Banks modernized its approach to data by adopting Snowflake and implementing Coalesce for data transformations. Instead of relying on outdated tools and manual processes, UCB gained agility to innovate quickly while maintaining compliance. With governed, AI-ready data pipelines, they’re now delivering insights that power smarter business decisions and improve customer experiences.
WSECU gains richer insight into business data
Washington State Employees Credit Union (WSECU) turned to Coalesce to better serve members with timely insights and reporting. By streamlining their transformation layer, WSECU enabled analytics teams to trust their data and innovate faster. The result: improved operational efficiency and better visibility into member behaviors, fueling data-driven decision-making across the organization.
Group 1001: Transforming ‘old school’ insurance with data
Group 1001, a major player in insurance, used Coalesce to modernize data practices in an industry notorious for legacy systems. By automating transformations in Snowflake, they not only reduced risk and manual effort but also created a foundation for innovation—bringing insurance data strategies into the digital age and enabling faster delivery of customer insights.
Q2: Driving cost efficiency with transformation at scale
Q2, a digital banking provider, faced surging costs and complexity as customer demands grew. With Coalesce, they streamlined their data transformation processes, reducing costs while maintaining performance and governance. The move has empowered Q2’s data teams to keep pace with growth while delivering value back to the business.
HUB International: Bringing data strategy into the modern age
As one of the world’s largest insurance brokers, HUB International turned to Coalesce to modernize clinical informatics and data strategy. By unifying and governing data in Snowflake with Coalesce, Hub empowered teams to better manage risk, improve efficiency, and create stronger foundations for analytics and reporting.
The business and cultural impact of Coalesce in finserv
Across these stories, several themes emerge:
- Data Teams: Engineers spend less time on manual, repetitive work and more time on strategic initiatives.
- Data Culture: Collaboration between business and technical teams improves trust in data, creating a culture of evidence-based decision-making.
- The Business: Faster access to governed data drives innovation—from launching new financial products to improving customer service—while reducing risk and cost.
Building the future of financial services with data
Financial services organizations that succeed in the next decade will be those that modernize their data practices today. With Coalesce, banks, insurers, and credit unions are turning data into a competitive advantage—faster, safer, and with greater cultural impact.
By addressing challenges head-on and embedding governance into every transformation, Coalesce empowers financial services companies not only to keep up with change, but to lead it.
See how Coalesce can help your financial services organization accelerate innovation—book a demo to learn more.