Data Army deployed for MA Money project

Sydney consultancy Data Army has been deployed to deliver a project for non-bank mortgage lender MA Money, combining Microsoft Azure, Snowflake and Tableau technology in the process.

The project, which was delivered in a six-week timeframe from September 2023 to November 2023, included a self-service analytics platform to track mortgage data for use within the lender’s treasury department and by external parties.

Chris Wyke, joint CEO of MA Money partner company MA Financial Group, said Data Army was chosen due to having “confidence in their team’s expertise and capabilities in information modelling and testing”.

“Their strong track record of delivery, proven processes and focus on innovation aligned perfectly with our project needs and tight timeframe. We were also impressed with their willingness to embed their team into our Agile scrum framework,” he said.

Data Army also provided data retrieval and ingestion using Azure Data Factory (ADF), data staging on Azure Data Lake Gen 2 blob storage and utilising Snowflake for the company’s data lake, data warehouse and data mart. Additionally, Tableau was used to query Snowflake for self-service analytics and business intelligence. 

The initial framework of the test suite was set up with data transformation tool dbt, which is being used to alert MA Money of potential issues to cut down on the chance of poor information quality or historical data remediation events.

“MA Money is a progressive mortgage provider that moves fast. They needed a modern data solution in a short period of time that could afford no short cuts in quality and could serve the business into the future as they grow,“ said Michael Ogilvie, director at Data Army.

“Data Army’s experience with modern data stack solutions and close collaboration with the MA Money team proved to be a winning combination that delivered the project on time, on budget and left the business with solid foundations for digital growth.“

Data Money’s new solution also helped support MA Money’s inaugural $500 million residential Mortgage-Backed Security (RMBS) public term issuance, which took place in November and was labelled by Wyke as a “meaningful milestone” at the time.

“Since the completion of our inaugural RMBS insurance, our team continue to develop our platform in preparation for future issuances,” Wyke added.

Data Army’s project with MA Money comes a month after it announced its partnership with US-based Coalesce to expand its portfolio of offerings, which includes the vendor’s data transformation platform for building, managing and collaborating on Snowflake-based projects.