Camden National Corporation (NASDAQ:CAC), headquartered in Camden, Maine, is the largest publicly traded bank holding company in Northern New England with $5.1 billion in assets and 610 employees. Camden National Bank, its subsidiary, is a full-service community bank founded in 1875 that offers an array of consumer and business financial products and services, accompanied by the latest in digital banking technology to empower customers to bank the way they want. The Bank provides personalized service through a network of 58 banking centers, 66 ATMs, and lending offices in New Hampshire and Massachusetts, all complemented by 24/7 live phone support. Camden National Bank has received 11 “Lender at Work for Maine” Awards from the Finance Authority of Maine and was rated a Best-Performing Community Bank by S&P Global in 2020. Greenwich Associates named the bank a Customer Experience Leader in U.S. Retail Banking. Comprehensive wealth management, investment and financial planning services are delivered by Camden National Wealth Management. To learn more, visit CamdenNational.com. Member FDIC.
"Camden National Bank navigated challenging economic waters by effectively using in-house and 3rd party data to identify the right retail and commercial opportunities to focus resources on, resulting in higher close rates and more satisfied clients."
Alicia Dambrie, Vice President and Business Intelligence Manager at Camden National Bank,
In the last three years, Camden National Bank revolutionized the way it uses data. With the help of Passerelle system integrators and data engineers, Camden National Bank implemented Talend data integration with the Snowflake Data Cloud and Tableau Visual Analytics. Observing the success of the system architecture, Passerelle created an acceleration framework – Data Rocket – that is now being used by Camden National Bank and throughout financial services, manufacturing, healthcare and energy sectors to automate data migration, improve data quality, support data governance, and create actionable insights across organizations.
To support growth goals and respond to changes in the competitive landscape, Camden National Bank needed to move away from legacy data storage that kept data spread across different sources. Passerelle worked with Camden National Bank’s Business Intelligence Architects to implement Talend data integration with Snowflake’s Data Cloud and Tableau Analytics.
Alicia Dambrie, Vice President and Business Intelligence Manager at Camden National Bank, said Snowflake’s native functionality reduces time to insights. Important tasks, such as server historicizing, became nearly effortless. “With Snowflake, we built a framework that will historicize a new source system within an hour,” Alicia explained. “Without Snowflake, that would have taken more than double the time – without opportunity to transition the work to less experienced engineers.”
As part of Data Rocket, data is automatically ingested from key banking systems including Jack Henry Core Banking, Jack Henry CRM, Sageworks, and Encompass to the Snowflake Data Cloud.
Alicia said Data Rocket brings value as an end-to-end solution.
“These tools are the best in the market, and are continuously evolving and getting better,” she explained. “There’s always a new feature set that makes it easier for us to be able to do what we do.”
Connecting ingested data to Tableau through Snowflake’s Data Cloud, Data Rocket supports self-service in scale to meet bank goals. Currently, there are 125 Tableau users throughout the organization, fueling insights for Retail Banking, Commercial Banking, Wealth Management and Risk Mitigation.
In addition to Tableau’s out-of-the-box reporting capabilities, custom dashboards were created for commercial sales prospecting, business intelligence performance and global sales prospecting.
The commercial sales prospecting dashboard delivers new, high-value lead opportunities in commercial lending. Using datasets from S&P Global Lending – available through Snowflake’s Data Mart – Camden National Bank integrated 3rd party data into its data warehouse. Alicia said the integration of 3rd party data supercharged the bank’s insights.
“With our dashboard, we visualized 70,000 prospect leads in a manageable format for the commercial lending and retail lending teams,” Alicia said. Tableau’s intuitive filters allowed users to sort through data to find exactly what they need. “Tableau allows us take external data, ingest it, and only use the data that’s applicable to our company profile and our company objectives.”
These dashboards proved instrumental as Camden National Bank responded to repercussions of the COVID-19 pandemic. Traditional business leads, such as loans for restaurants and hotels, became less desirable, while other leads, in other markets not impacted by the pandemic gained relevance. Focused prospecting helped ensure Camden National Bank could put resources where they would see a return on investment.
“We run our entire company lean. We are a publicly traded bank – a lot of our competitors are privately held. We cannot out cold-call our competitors,” Alicia explained. “We need to be smarter about prospecting because we don’t have the workforce to ‘out call’ them. The architecture we’ve built, that uses Passerelle’s Data Rocket, enables that.”
As Camden National Bank strives to meet customer demands and exceed expectations, Alicia and her team partner with Passerelle to keep their data architecture future-ready.
“When you have a small team that is forced to be heads down, it’s hard to stay informed on use case options in the broader industry – Passerelle has continued to alert us of opportunities either with new data sets, or new tool functionality,” Alicia said, pointing to releases in Data Rocket 2021.3 that include audit functionality and Master Record. “Passerelle develops solutions that address our needs.”
Ultimately, Camden National Bank’s data architecture results in a better experience for Camden National Bank customers.
“When, we have a simple, clear, repeatable process to ingest data, it frees up our resources to focus on data governance,” Alicia said. “That is the biggest deal for our customers – to know foundationally everything is secure and reliable and taken care of.”