How Ascent Funding Streamlined Executive Reporting with Power BI and Solver

Chapter 1: Ascent Funding is a leading outcomes-focused company, with a mission to revolutionize the way students pay for higher education.

0:11 [Music]

Chapter 2: Solver invited CFO Ryan Gray for a virtual sit-down to share how Ascent Funding has been successfully using Solver and to discuss future plans.

0:22 Hi, my name is Ryan Gray, and I'm the Chief Financial Officer of Ascent Funding. Most of my experience spans capital markets and raising debt capital to finance that, and I've been a part of raising capital on over $15 billion worth of assets.

0:39 The current area where we're spending most of the time using Solver is on timely financial reporting to all of the operating companies and the underlying business lines, being able to close the books efficiently, and then spending time getting the financial results into the hands of the vice presidents so they can see the results in a timely manner.

0:55 Along with that, we're able to compare very efficiently the forecast level, how they're doing versus budget, not only on a one-year view but also on a multi-year view as we look to grow and build a three-year and five-year plan.

1:15 [Music]

Chapter 3: How has Solver given you better visibility into performance?

1:17 Just one example is I want to see what the cash balances are for the total organization on a daily basis. I now have an email with a link that shows me the sources and uses of cash throughout the total organization at the subsidiary level, and I don't have to ask for that information anymore.

1:32 It automatically is delivered to me, so whenever I need to take a quick glance, I'll open that link and see what I need to look at. If there's a question, I can immediately react to that.

1:48 Mostly in a lot of our financing structures, where we are either borrowing money from investment banks or selling some of the consumer loans that we are originating to investment banks or other institutional investors.

2:04 There was a three- to four-month period where we had approximately four financing structures that provided about $500 million of liquidity that just needed to go under the microscope. Everything was amended and executed so we did not lose any liquidity—it just took a significant amount of time.

2:20 We had to walk through the overall impacts of how the pandemic was affecting consumer loans. The other impacts were just the uncertainty of the overall consumer market and how consumer assets would be performing.

2:36 Therefore, there was an increase in pricing to consumers, and that had an impact on the overall loan volume that we were able to originate.

2:45 Coming out of the pandemic, we reset all of our forecasts, and we actually exceeded all of them based upon the initial assessment of what we thought we would be able to accomplish with a modified version of originations throughout the year.

3:03 The next thing we've been focused on, which enables the next level of decision-making and reporting, is connecting it to the Power BI dashboards.

3:10 That was one of the things when I was at the Ascend conference a couple of years ago. The only sessions I sat in on were the Solver Power BI reporting platform and dashboard capabilities.

3:25 I brought that back, and we've been implementing that—maybe a little more slowly—but that is what's going to enable much more reporting at the executive level as we move toward more of a dashboard approach.

3:40 For instance, we're able to extract a lot of information from our data warehouse on a daily basis regarding the performance of our assets, load that into Solver, and then push it through to certain Power BI dashboards.

3:56 Those dashboards are automatically delivered, depending on the required frequency, to a number of executives.

4:05 Some of those dashboards were already in place before the pandemic or right at the beginning, and then there were a number that I implemented during the pandemic so that we could monitor certain trigger events needed for cash requirements or performance requirements within our overall portfolio.

4:21 That's how using the ERP, CPM, and the dashboarding network—all of these things with Solver connecting them together—really enabled us to get information into the executives' hands.

4:36 In a timely manner.