Pretty much everyone at some point in their life has had to deal with spreadsheets, but working with them every day is a different story. Love or hate: spreadsheets arouse strong feelings. Quick calculations and fast plots may spark our infatuation, but there are also some major drawbacks that may grate on your nerves over time and bring your love affair to a bitter end.

Superficially spreadsheets seem pretty user-friendly, but as you dig deeper, you’ll find yourself up against some major limitations. They lack the scalability needed to prepare large amounts of data, so analyzing large spreadsheets can become a nightmare: an ineffective, time-consuming, and error-prone nightmare.

Data analysis already plays a key role in the business world, as it helps organizations discover market trends, find data-driven actionable insights, and make informed decisions. And its role is expected to become increasingly strategic. Although spreadsheets are widely used in this field, there are far more suitable tools which greatly enhance job performance.

In this article we’ll go through 3 pain points of spreadsheets that are most likely slowing down your data projects. By asking ourselves some important questions, we’ll highlight the areas that could be improved.

1. Are you having a hard time unlocking key data?

Analyzing data and explaining the outcome to clients and stakeholders is not an easy task with standard spreadsheets. Data preparation often involves complex formulas, where you risk overwriting or modifying the original data, and it’s simply too easy to lose track of what you’ve done, and undoing operations can become a messy affair. Providing convincing data-driven decisions when you’re not sure yourself what happened, can be a struggle to say the least.

2. Are you sure you’re using the right tool for data consistency? 

The risk of data inconsistency with spreadsheets is high. When spreadsheets are shared across teams, data may be updated or modified, consequently creating conflicting copies or duplicates. Human data entry is also a critical element of worksheets, as it’s easy to make mistakes, compromising the whole data integrity of the project.

3. Is your data preparation process resilient to change?

Data preparation with spreadsheets can get very complicated when your data is saved in multiple files, which may also be in different formats. The whole process is also not resilient to change, so whenever your data changes, you must make tricky manual adjustments or even start again from scratch.

It’s time to move on!

It’s time to make a clean break with spreadsheets and move on. When data preparation sucks up the majority of your time, you need to find a new approach. Rulex Platform offers you an innovative way to solve your complex data problems, with its flexible, scalable, and resilient software.

• Seeing the big picture

  In Rulex Platform you can confidently explore data, knowing that the software is tracking your operations for you. If you don’t get the results you expected, you can easily roll back all operations, or even reinstate the original data with a few clicks. This flexibility means you can calmly explain how you reached your conclusions, while wowing your colleagues with interactive dashboards.

• Working safely with large volumes of data

  Rulex Platform can effortlessly manage huge amounts of data, collecting and merging files from multiple formats and sources, so you can view and explore the results in a single environment.

• Make data preparation a piece of cake

  Rulex data preparation is resilient to change, as it can be easily applied to new data without rewriting operations and formulas, so finally your team can stop wasting time on repetitive tasks.

Rulex platform in action

Actions speak louder than words, so let’s see how to perform some data prep operations in Rulex Platform.

To learn more about how Rulex Platform works, sign up to Rulex Academy and follow the course “Moving from spreadsheets to Rulex”. This course helps spreadsheet users smoothly transition to Rulex Platform and explains how the latter solves the most common data preparation issues that many analysts face.

The true is not all digital transformations are the same. This makes it particularly difficult for financial institutions to identify the AI-based solution that fits best their business. In a previous article, we listed 3 key points which, in our experience, make a difference to the digital transformation of financial services: 1. valuing domain expertise, 2. staying human-centric, 3. respecting privacy regulations. These are the principles we follow every time we help a business approach and integrate eXplainable AI into its decision-making process:

1. Rulex platform seamlessly integrates data-driven insight with human expertise expressed through heuristic rules, to reach optimum results.

2. It supports users through its clear box technology, providing human understandable reasons for each prediction, so users are always fully in control of the process.

3. It employs eXplainable AI to produce predictive models in the form of self-explanatory logical if-then rules (see here for more details), which can be fully understood and explained by business users, making it GDPR compliant by design.

Digital transformation in action: ad-hoc financial services solutions 

Rulex offers a suite of advanced solutions for the financial sector, from compliance and data governance to lending and credit risk, and marketing & commerce. In this article, we see Rulex technology in action, considering two case studies.

How we manage false positives in fraud detention

Detecting fraud is statistically complex, due to the limited samples of fraud, which correspond to approximately 1% overall. Consequently, the risk of creating false positives is very high.

Rulex technology found a solution to this problem and was key to building a successful anti-fraud solution together with official partner GFT, for the banking and insurance sector. How does this solution work?

Rulex’s innovative LLM algorithm (characterized by a high level of explainability) is able to identify patterns from the limited sample data of actual fraud and build reliable and accurate predictive models. The output is a fraud shortlist, which can subsequently be tailored to the anti-fraud team needs, integrating their domain business knowledge. Finally, a score is added to each record in the shortlist, which ranks the likelihood of fraud.

How to evaluate the best course of action for NPLs?

The logical approach of many credit institutes is to pursue legal actions to recover funds from non-performing loans. However, this is an expensive and time-consuming strategy, the highest cost derives from initiating and pursuing legal actions to force repayment, also considering that many litigated loans are lost to default nonetheless.

Rulex’s NPL solution is able to distinguish between cases where it is worth starting a legal action to retrieve funds, and cases where a legal action would simply represent a further loss of money.

For those credits where collection is recommended, Rulex’s NPL solution also suggests the most efficient course of action in terms of success and cost of resources. It provides a list of operational actions that guide the operator in the credit recovery decision process, thus providing not only tactical, but also strategical information to empower the decision process.

The next step: how Rulex can help your business

The use of eXplainable artificial intelligence can help organizations combat fraud, estimate risks, and recover funds. But what can Rulex technology do for your business? Visit our dedicated Financial Services page to explore all our case-studies, find more information regarding our solutions, and get in touch with our experts.