Trifacta Legends recognizes customers every month who are doing groundbreaking work with data using Trifacta.
We’re pleased to announce the Trifacta Legends for June 2022: Huong Do from Canopy
Huong Do is a product owner at Canopy. She has a strong background in the data space, including ingestion, aggregations, and ETL transformations. She has been in the data space for a very long time developing data products, including the bread and butter of Canopy software.
We talked to Huong about her experience building data products at Canopy. She shared some of the challenges Canopy faced, and how they overcame them with Designer Cloud’s self-service solution.
Trifacta: Huong, can you tell us a little more about yourself?
Huong: Sure! I graduated from National University of Singapore in 2017, and I have been part of Canopy since then. I’m in charge of designing and delivering automated functions for data ingestions and aggregations. I also help with evaluating business processes, anticipating requirements, and uncovering areas for improvement to develop solutions that help with automations in the company. Currently, I’m managing data-related products and I supervise other BAs on delivering requirements and solutions for our team and our clients.
Trifacta: Awesome! With that, can you tell us a little more about Canopy as a company?
Huong: Canopy is a cloud-based financial data aggregation and analytics platform. Our main clients are family offices, wealth managers, private banks, trustees, and self-directed traders. Currently, we report on more than $160 billion in assets across our 335 custodians. Our goal is to provide our clients with a more holistic view of their investment portfolios so that they are able to make better investment decisions. Currently, we offer 3 main types of services: data acquisition & aggregation, data cleansing & standardization, and analytics visualization & reporting. And Designer Cloud powered by Trifacta is playing a very important part in our data cleansing and standardization as a service for our clients.
Trifacta: That’s awesome. I’m glad the product is helping you achieve those goals. Do you mind sharing how you were doing things before, how Designer Cloud has simplified your process of standardization and cleansing, and how Canopy plays a role in the end product that customers touch?
Huong: So we used to have a multi-layered, time-consuming process, with large dependencies between the analysts and data engineers to do data cleansing and transformation. There was a lot of back-and-forth in communications between the analysts who understand the data and the data engineers who know how to code. As part of the normal process, the analyst had to put the logic down in a way that the developer could understand, then the developer would do the coding before going back to the analyst to do the testing of the transformation and the cleansing.
Trifacta: What were some of the challenges with that process?
Huong: The entire process was very human-dependent, and very time-consuming, because there was a lot of back-and-forth communication. It also depended on our development schedule as well. Because of that, we found that it was not effective for us to onboard new data sources quickly, smoothly, or effectively. So we needed to find a better solution and a better way of dealing with these issues so that we could reach a larger market and get in touch with more data providers without dependencies that would hinder us from onboarding more and more data sources in a timely manner for our clients.
Trifacta: That makes sense! And how did Designer Cloud help solve that back-and-forth problem?
Huong: Designer Cloud provided us with a very user-friendly platform for our data analysts to own and do the data transformation and cleansing by themselves without the dependencies on the developers who know how to code. So those loops of back-and-forth communication between the data analysts and data engineers are now totally removed, and data analysts can work directly on Designer Cloud to do the cleansing and transformation. And the result of their transformations are shown to them in real-time previews, and that helps to reduce our cleansing and transformation turnaround time, and reduces the turnaround time to onboard new data sources from weeks to hours.
Trifacta: That’s incredible! What have been some of the benefits Canopy has experienced following this implementation of Designer Cloud?
Huong: This has created great opportunities for us to reach out to new markets and new data providers with new sources because we are able to shorten the turnaround time of onboarding new data sources. This also allowed us to reallocate our resources to make sure that we use our resources on more impactful or more important features in the products, and it has also helped us with hiring as well, because now we just need one person and not multiple team members in a back-and-forth process.
Trifacta: That’s awesome! I love the fact that you are able to now scale and go into a broader market. Thanks so much for sharing your story with us, Huong!
Huong: It’s my pleasure!