Blend Accelerates Business Value with Fivetran and Hightouch

• Functional Applications - Warehouse Management Systems (WMS)
• Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Application Development Platforms

• Equipment & Machinery
• Finance & Insurance

• Sales & Marketing
• Warehouse & Inventory Management

• Leasing Finance Automation
• Time Sensitive Networking

• Data Science Services
• System Integration

Blend, a fintech startup, was facing a significant challenge with its data ingestion process. Despite having adopted a modern data stack approach with Redshift at its core, getting data into and out of the data warehouse was proving to be a complex and time-consuming task. The process of pulling a single column from Salesforce or changing a field could take weeks, limiting access to time-critical data. The team was unable to prototype and rapidly iterate, and had to release straight to production to test their solutions, causing further complications for the operations team. As the company expanded, new tools like Asana, Marketo, and Lever were introduced to manage workflows and processes, each requiring data to be synced inside them to be effective. With the data engineering team’s limited bandwidth, they did not have the capacity to maintain a rapidly expanding list of SaaS platforms. This led to a decision point: commit to in-house tooling, or look for external providers.

Blend is a fintech startup founded in 2012 that has risen to prominence in the banking software space. The company announced its IPO in July 2021. In the last year alone, Blend enabled financial services firms to process nearly $1.4 trillion in loan applications, handling an average of more than $5 billion in transactions every day. Blend's vision is to re-architect banking software around the consumer, providing a customer experience in line with the service offered by other disruptive, digital-first applications and businesses. This requires massive internal coordination, which is central to the roles of Ryan Dunlap and William Tsu, who work on the Customer Success Operations team at Blend. Their team’s purpose is to build out large, innovative business systems to enable the business to move quickly.

In their search for a solution, Blend's team laid out clear criteria for assessing ELT and Reverse ETL solutions, including ease of use, connector support, infosec requirements, and alerting capabilities. They needed a tool that was self-serve and would allow the team to deploy rapidly, with little to no dependency on data engineering. Fivetran emerged as a clear frontrunner for handling the extract, load, and transformation process. For Reverse ETL, Hightouch’s impact was immediate and transformative. The Hightouch debugger and Slack integration is now used by the Blend team to understand when the Reverse ETL process has failed, enabling a greater degree of trust in data accuracy across the board. The finance team, in particular, benefited from access to reliable data. Thanks to Fivetran and Hightouch’s Asana connectors, Blend’s finance team is now able to monitor and enforce time entry, understand project timelines, and close out services team financial reporting in three business days, where it previously took up to seven.

• The implementation of Fivetran and Hightouch has led to significant operational improvements at Blend. Previously siloed data in Asana is now shared between platforms, eliminating the need for manual copying of fields and values. This has enabled the Blend team to accurately assess the holistic ROI of projects, predict shortfalls in staffing before they occur, and understand where the business over or under-serviced an account. The ability to connect product data to Salesforce data using Hightouch has also been vital in ensuring visibility between teams and establishing the warehouse as the single source of truth. This has given sales and customer success teams a clearer picture of account health and activity, and has encouraged Sales and Customer Success to work together more effectively. Overall, the adoption of these tools has enabled the enablement team to efficiently increase the business’ bottom line.

• Blend’s Finance department is now able to close out service team books four days earlier, cutting the team’s financial reporting time in half.
• The process of creating net-new pipelines used to take Blend’s engineering team up to a month; the Blend Operations team estimates that the self-serve process now takes the Enablement team just under three working days.
• Time to modify existing pipelines has gone from an estimated two days to just a minute.