Case study: Piwik PRO Web Analytics for Finance and Banking sector

Piwik PRO serves a number of clients from the finance and banking sectors. Because we put data safety and user privacy first, this makes us a natural partner for data-sensitive industries.

This blog post is focused on the Global Financial case study to explain how our solution benefits industries dealing with mountains of sensitive data. Of course, the Piwik PRO Analytics suite is not only dedicated to web analytics for financial services and banking. Every organization that needs comprehensive reporting combined with data security and full data ownership can benefit from Piwik PRO.

Keep reading to learn how we help one of the world’s largest financial services groups get the insights it needs.

1. The challenge

Global Financial, a world-leading financial services conglomerate with assets under management of over 2.0 trillion USD*, came to us with a list of their needs. Or better yet, a list of challenges they wanted us to overcome. These included:

• helping them understand what drives customers to choose certain investment and savings products
• integrating data collection by Piwik PRO with a third-party data warehouse
• setting up a system that offers full reporting and maximum data security without using JavaScript tracking (which requires changing the website’s source code) while ensuring absolutely 100% airtight data security

The most challenging requirement was the last one. There are few analytics partners up to the task. Because of differences in philosophy and their business model, other web analytics providers depend mainly on JavaScript Tracking, which was off the table in this particular case. More about that later.

2. The solutions

Our engineers put their heads together and figured out how we could make Piwik PRO do what Global Financial needed it to do. Let’s break it down point-by-point.

The need: Understanding website user behavior and delivering actionable insights.

The solution: Piwik PRO provided Global Financial with a host of enterprise-class analytics solutions.

Along with a full range of standard enterprise web analytics reports, Global Financial takes advantage of premium features like the Comparison Dashboard to compare their most important customer segments side-by-side, as well as Click Path and Funnel Analytics to track individual visitors’ journeys around their websites.

More importantly, Piwik PRO can record an unlimited amount of data and delivers reports based on 100% of website traffic. This means that no data sampling skews your metrics, and accurate insights are always accessible by default. Global Financial places great importance on this because they operate in a highly competitive industry. Reports based on a subset of traffic may have a negative impact on profit margins.

Global Financial receives daily compiled reports about the performance of every product page, as well as different language versions of the website. These presentations can easily be customized for granularity, giving the right people the right information.

The need: integrating Piwik PRO data collection with Global Financial’s third-party data warehouse.

The solution: Our analytics engineers helped Global Finance develop a means of transferring their analytics data to a third-party data warehouse.

In the case of large deployments like Global Financial, it’s necessary to provide ongoing consulting services and evaluate the client’s infrastructure. This way we’re sure that all the web analytics data collected and generated reports are properly stored and processed. It also helps us make sure data security is never compromised.

As a rule, Piwik PRO uses a dedicated API for handling data in the way Global Financial wanted us to.

This time, however, Global Financial reported that some modifications had to be made in order to get the data shipped to the third-party warehouse without impacting their frontend performance. So we employed our expertise and experience to help them set up a secondary db node for read-only mode.

This ensures that fetching SQL queries to retrieve and forward the data to its storage place doesn’t harm the frontend performance of Global Financial’s infrastructure.

The need: a customized reporting solution that doesn’t require JavaScript, as well as additional safety and security measures to ensure compliance with EU, USA and other regulatory regimes concerning.

The solution: To achieve the airtight data protection measures Global Financial required, the specialist engineers at Piwik PRO needed to implement a highly-customized solution.

We set Piwik PRO up to separate the data receival endpoint from the server that holds that data, taking in only data that passes through the firewall.

Piwik PRO is designed by default to be secure and to protect user privacy. More importantly, it’s made to be flexible, and gives you possibility to collect data based on server logs.

But for a massive financial services company operating across dozens of jurisdictions and subject to multiple legal regimes, the security of web analytics data has to be given absolute priority. This is why we put together a bespoke solution for Global Financial.

Our response to their needs was to set up a method for transporting web analytics data logs from website servers. This kind of setup means that there is no need to make even a single change in the website’s source code (e.g. using JavaScript tracking) in order to produce analytics data – an important requirement of Global Financial.

In this particular case, we have written and deployed a custom scripted tool to transport logs for analysis by Global Financial. The solutions devised by Piwik PRO work for logs from diverse types of web servers, both Windows and Linux stacks.

Lastly, we configured Piwik PRO privacy settings to exclude IP addresses and exact user locations, keeping it compliant with regulations.

3. The results

Piwik PRO delivered a deployment to Global Financial that satisfies their extensive and complex web analytics data security requirements.

Today, Global Financial has a solution at their fingertips which gives them a wealth of data they use every day to refine their services and do better business.

Piwik PRO continues to deliver 100% data ownership plus full privacy protection, and 24/7 monitoring, technical support, updates, and server administration.

Read the full case study based on Global Financial here

*Our agreement with Global Financial includes very strict non-disclosure language, so we can’t tell you exactly who they are. Let’s just say they’re really, really big – they have tens of thousands of employees, and their stock makes up part of the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Big.