Paystack accelerates data discovery by creating a single source of truth across their data stack

Paystack, a member of Stripe’s Global Payments and Treasury Network, processes over 50% of all online transactions in Nigeria. As the leader in an online commerce market that is growing 75% faster than the global average, Paystack makes it easy for organizations of all sizes to securely collect online and offline payments, launch new business models, and strengthen customer relationships.

By partnering with Secoda's Data Enablement Platform, the data team has been able to centralize its data knowledge and resources, serve data consumers, and automate its data governance. This has allowed Paystack to save time while ensuring that its data is properly managed on a recurring basis.

With Secoda, Abisola Oni and Ruan Van Rhyn, Data Analytics Principals at Paystack were able to:

1. Create a single source of truth and automate data governance
2. Effectively enable the data team and data consumers 
3. Simplify data consumption for business users

Creating a single source of truth

Before implementing Secoda, data related documentation lived across different platforms such as Google Sheets, Notion, Slack and Jira. With the amount of data being generated increasing exponentially, it can be difficult for data teams to keep track of all the data flows and ensure that data governance policies are being followed. The data team at Paystack used Secoda’s automated data lineage to gain a comprehensive view of how data is moving through their stack (initially onboarding with Redshift, Tableau, and Metabase). Now the data team was enabled with a single source of truth to find, understand, and leverage data in order to support business users who needed insights and questions answered. By automating the data lineage process, the data team reduces the risk of errors and ensures that data is properly managed on a recurring basis without any manual effort.

“Secoda opened up a new world to us in terms of data lineage. Now, we can instantly know the upstream and downstream impacts of a potential change.”

By having their documentation consolidated in one place, the data team found it easier to manage data governance policies, classify tables, columns, and fields, and create access policies in various systems. Additionally, Secoda automatically identifies PII columns and allows the data team to import their own classifications according to Paystack’s DPP data privacy guidelines via CSV. These automations saved the data team 80% of the time they would have spent doing it manually.

“It was love at first sight. Secoda helps us centralize our data knowledge and resources so that no matter what your technical capabilities are, you can quickly find the data you need to execute your projects and tasks efficiently.”

Enabling Data Consumers across the Organization

Paystack has over 100 data consumers across the company with the majority of them needing to run their own queries and build their own dashboards. Using Secoda, the data team made it easier for data consumers and business users to find the data they need to power their decisions.

“For the data team, Secoda is the entry point to our data ecosystem.”

Beside each dashboard in Tableau, the data team added a Secoda button that links directly to its corresponding documentation, making it easier for data consumers to find documentation related to a specific dashboard. From Secoda, data consumers have direct access to the dashboard when starting from the Secoda documentation.

“​​Pre Secoda: I used my IDE to scroll through tables most of the time, but I still had to ask colleagues for clarification frequently. It took me more than three months to understand our data models when I first joined the company.

Post Secoda: With Secoda, I can use the search feature to find any columns, tables, or dashboards throughout our entire data systems. This helps me be more independent in my day-to-day work, which makes me faster and more productive.”

Simplifying data consumption for business users

To Abby and Ruan, one of the key advantages of Secoda is its business-friendly and intuitive user interface. The data team found that they did not need to provide a lot of training to their users before they could start using Secoda. 

“One of the strong points of Secoda is that it’s so easy to use. Our goal is to make it a pleasure for everyone to use - even for people beyond the data team. We have a lot of data consumers these days and the volume of data they have to deal with can be overwhelming - We are looking to Secoda to continue to simplify that for them and us.”

Additionally, the data team prompts their data consumers to check Secoda first when they make a request to the data team via their Jira request flow in Slack. This move is to encourage users so  they can be self-sufficient and do not have to wait for the data team to fulfill their requests.

“Before Secoda, we found that answers would get lost in the firehose of all the information we have and we would have to answer the same question multiple times.”

With Secoda’s automated metadata ingestion and data lineage, users have access to the most up-to-date information at all times. As a result, the data team is able to provide its users with a seamless experience that is both convenient and reliable.

Conclusion

Fintech companies are at the forefront of innovation, using technology to create new and innovative financial services. However, with this innovation comes a responsibility to protect the sensitive data of their customers, including personally identifiable information (PII).

One way that fintech companies can safely manage PII is by using Secoda’s Data Enablement Platform. Secoda can automatically identify and classify PII data, as well as allow users to import their own classifications via CSV. This can help fintech companies save time while ensuring that their PII data is properly managed on a recurring basis without any manual effort.

Create a free account with Secoda and start automating your data governance processes today.

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