Turning a one-off BI build into a product banks could deploy in under an hour
How a custom BI platform for banking clients became a modular, productized offering — new deployments fully configured in under an hour, sold as ready-to-ship add-ons instead of rebuilt from scratch each time.
Engagement from 2019–2022, written up here as a track-record example.
The situation
Banking clients kept needing the same kind of BI platform — asset and financial portfolio reporting, customer onboarding, invoicing, reconciliation, credit scoring — but building each one as a bespoke project meant re-solving the same problems, and re-selling the same story, every time.
What changed
- Built a modular BI platform on Azure SQL Database, with ELT orchestration via Azure Data Factory feeding Azure Analysis Services Tabular models, surfaced through Power BI.
- Fully automated deployment via Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates, Azure PowerShell, and Azure CLI — a new client instance could go from zero to fully configured in under an hour.
- Packaged the platform’s capabilities — transaction reconciliation, loan onboarding, credit scoring, asset banking — as modular, ready-to-ship add-ons rather than one-off custom builds, deployed for multiple banking clients.
- The entire environment — infrastructure, monitoring, and deployment is controlled through Azure DevOps CI/CD, so provisioning a new environment is a pipeline run, not a manual project.
Why it matters
Most BI engagements get billed as projects: solve it once, invoice, move to the next client, solve the same problem again. Productizing the platform — same modules, automated deployment, incremental delivery — turned repeat client needs into a repeatable asset instead of repeat labor.