Chapter 10

Financial Services

The financial services industry encompasses a wide variety of businesses, including credit card companies, brokerage firms, and mortgage providers. In this chapter, we'll primarily focus on the retail bank since most readers have some degree of personal familiarity with this type of financial institution. A full-service bank offers a breadth of products, including checking accounts, savings accounts, mortgage loans, personal loans, credit cards, and safe deposit boxes. This chapter begins with a very simplistic schema. We then explore several schema extensions, including the handling of the bank's broad portfolio of heterogeneous products that vary significantly by line of business.

We want to remind you that industry focused chapters like this one are not intended to provide full-scale industry solutions. Although various dimensional modeling techniques are discussed in the context of a given industry, the techniques are certainly applicable to other businesses. If you don't work in financial services, you still need to read this chapter. If you do work in financial services, remember that the schemas in this chapter should not be viewed as complete.

Chapter 10 discusses the following concepts:

  • Bus matrix snippet for a bank
  • Dimension triage to avoid the “too few dimensions” trap
  • Household dimensions
  • Bridge tables to associate multiple customers with an account, along with weighting factors
  • Multiple mini-dimensions in a single fact table
  • Dynamic value ...

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