Case Study: Oportun achieves trusted, governed data and streamlined cloud migration with Alation Data Catalog

How Innovative Lender Oportun Met Rapid Growth with Data Governance

Oportun is a mission-driven financial services company that provides affordable credit to people banks often turn away. Rapid customer and geographic growth, plus a migration to AWS, created a need for a single source of truth for reporting and regulatory compliance, better discovery of cloud data, and a way to capture institutional knowledge while balancing self-service with strong data governance.

Oportun implemented the Alation Data Catalog with automated metadata extraction, query-log ingestion, Trust Flags, Articles and a Compose query tool, and appointed data stewards to enforce governance. The catalog created a single window into trusted data, streamlined SEC and state reporting, and smoothed cloud migration—scaling SME knowledge-sharing and self‑service. Since adoption, users grew from 82 to 273 (Oct 2021), unique active visitors rose more than 75%, Compose queries increased 150%, and top analysts authored over 3,200 reusable queries.

Oportun

Yash Bhagde

Data Governance Manager