Real-Time KPI Visibility
Category
Financial Operations
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At Rail, the company had moved significant volumes of funds globally for over two years, yet lacked a single, consolidated view of its financial performance. Leadership had no reliable read on the KPIs that mattered, and wanted the key metrics in one place, updated in real time, so they could see how money was moving and act on it.
The challenge
After more than two years of moving funds globally, the business still had no consolidated view of its own performance. Leadership needed answers quickly, but also wanted a foundation that would scale rather than another one-off report.
No clear read on how much money was being moved, or which currencies, rails, and clients drove the volume.
No visibility into settlement times for each transaction type: deposits, withdrawals, and exchanges.
No automated, repeatable process for keeping an eye on these metrics. Monitoring meant manually pulling the data again every time.
The approach
I ran this in two phases: get answers on the table fast, then make those answers live and automatic.
Phase 1, rapid insights
Aligned with the Head of Financial Operations on the KPIs that mattered, got access to the data infrastructure in Apache Superset, wrote SQL to extract the full transaction history, and cleaned it in Excel to build a first reporting model covering custodian performance, volume over time, and SLAs.
Phase 2, automation and live monitoring
Built interactive Superset dashboards across currencies, clients, and transaction types, then connected Superset to Slack so teams were notified in real time when volumes shifted or patterns changed.
Phase 3, self-service by design
Set the dashboards up so any team could explore current data on their own, instead of pulling it together by hand whenever they needed it.
The impact
The business moved from static, delayed spreadsheets to a single live view of the metrics that mattered, bringing together for the first time the volumes and amounts moved over time, performance by custodian, distribution across currencies and clients, and how each transaction type was tracking against its SLA. That single source of truth changed how the whole company worked with its data.
Real-time Slack alerts that kept leadership informed and able to act immediately.
Manual reporting cycles replaced with dashboards.
One reliable source of truth that any team could draw on directly, rather than rebuilding the numbers case by case.
From Spreadsheets No One Trusted to Live, Self-Serve Data
Real visibility is not just a leadership dashboard, it is everyone working from the same numbers. Once the data was live and self-serve, teams stopped rebuilding it by hand and started acting on it, and the whole business moved faster because no one was waiting on someone else to pull a report.
