Case Study: Metro Bank achieves rapid, IT-free business efficiency gains with Microsoft Power BI

Metro Bank quickly delivers business efficiency gains without requiring involvement from IT

Metro Bank, a UK retail bank serving more than a million accounts, faced slow, costly analytics because its Oracle Financials core system was not suitable for reporting — analytics workloads interfered with transactions and BI development required IT and months to deliver. To enable agile, data-driven decision making across the business, Metro Bank adopted Microsoft Power BI alongside Azure, Azure SQL Database, Power Apps and Power Automate, with Paul Silvester leading the Power Platform delivery.

Using Microsoft Power BI and Azure, Metro Bank built an end-to-end time-tracking and resource-management solution (Power Apps front end, data in Azure SQL/Dataverse, Power Automate notifications, Power BI dataflows and reports) in six weeks; a pilot ran in August 2019 and companywide rollout was completed in October 2019. The result: granular, near‑real‑time project hours and budgets, over 100 Power BI reports in production, faster delivery of insights (months reduced to weeks), predictable workloads without new server hardware or ongoing IT intervention, and improved manager control and forecasting.

Metro Bank

Paul Silvester

Microsoft Power Platform Evangelizing Delivery Manager