Neo Financial

The challenge: Unlocking rapid decision-making across a fast-growing fintech

Neo Financial is Canada's fastest-growing fintech for a reason: they move quickly. To maintain that pace, the data team needed to accomplish two goals: 1) enable more colleagues to answer questions with data and 2) make sure that the data tools maintained everyone's data permissions.

The data team had tried point-and-click analytics tools before, hoping to enable business users to answer their own questions, but the reality fell short. Those tools required everyone to understand complex data models and know exactly which tables to query. Additionally, those tools were separate from the data team tools which led to frustrating fragmentation. This meant that analysts spent their days fielding basic questions — Where are our active customers located? What's causing this spike in fraud losses? — questions that execs and PMs needed answers to immediately to make decisions, leaving little time to invest in more strategic work.

“Hex became our go-to data platform that could help us scale by providing one place for analysis, apps, and AI-powered self-serve,” said Brandon Rochon, Head of Business Intelligence and Data Analytics.

The Solution: Self-service with trustworthy AI analytics

Self-serve and OAuth drove viral adoption

The data team evaluated AI data tools and landed on Hex because it could speed up their data workflow by unifying their data process and met criteria for trusted self-serve: security and accuracy.

OAuth that didn't sacrifice usability: Being a financial service, Neo Financial is in a highly regulated industry and needed tight and trustworthy data controls. Hex's OAuth connection solved this; whenever someone asks Hex a question — whether in Slack or Hex Threads — the query runs under that individual user's credentials, automatically following Snowflake's existing governance rules. This means that the data team can manage governance, and attribute cost and usage in one place. Ultimately, this enabled the viral adoption of Hex's agentic analytics without risk.

Accurate answers, even on raw data: Hex delivered something that the data team hadn't seen in other AI analytics tools: much more reliable answers that pulled context from their data warehouse. The agent read table descriptions, column definitions, and metadata directly from Snowflake (information that the team had already documented) and used it to understand their data structure. With Hex, they could explore and build insights with raw data immediately and build semantic models as adoption grew.

"In Hex, we could provide company-level context on products, and despite doing this with other tools, we could never give them enough context to be relevant,” Brandon Rochon, Neo Financial’s Head of Data Analytics and BI.

Delivering trusted self-service with Hex’s Slack integration

After the data team turned on Hex’s Slack integration, where teammates can ask @Hex a question and get an answer, they started to experience immediate relief and enthusiasm from their colleagues. “Hex unlocked silos of data, allowing teams to find answers to questions with data they couldn’t access before,” said Brandon Rochon, Neo Financial’s Head of Data Analytics and BI.

This self-serve approach is trustworthy for two reasons. First, each user gets answers based on their own permissions. Second, Hex's Threads agent displays the logic and analysis alongside every answer, making it easy to verify results and explore further questions about the data or approach.

Today, 139 people, including the CEO, VP of Ops, and CTO, actively use the Slack integration to get answers to questions like:

• How many e-transfers happened today?

• How many net new active customers did we gain today?

• Tell me about what fields we have available to study contribution margin at an account or customer level.

The Slack Hex integration also lets team members ask questions from anywhere. "Through the Slack integration, I can ask Hex questions from my phone at the playground,” David Adair, Neo Financial’s Group Product Manager for Cards and Lending, said. “Questions that would have gone unasked now get immediate answers.”

For the data team, the Slack + Hex integration has led to a dramatic reduction of quick questions and less meeting follow-ups that required pulling data. Learn more about how the data team rolled out their Slack Hex channels strategically.

Product analytics that uncovers opportunities in real-time

For David, a product manager at Neo Financial, Hex has become essential to how he builds products. He uses it to monitor launches, run A/B tests, and validate ideas — all without waiting on the data team.

Here's an example of how it works in practice: David read an industry article suggesting digital wallet users spend twice as much as physical card users. Instead of filing this away or creating a data ticket, he opens Slack and asks @Hex a few questions: “How does Neo Financial's digital wallet usage compare? What's the spending frequency? What are customers buying?”

Minutes later, he has answers. Neo Financial's digital wallet users spend 1.8x more frequently, mostly on dining and groceries. But when David digs deeper into the provisioning data, he spots something unexpected — friction points in how customers add cards to Apple Pay and Google Pay. Now he knows to fix that friction before launching any new campaign.

"I can have a thought, fire off a question through Hex's Slack integration, get an insight, and decide what to do — all in the time it takes to stand in line for coffee," David said.

That speed compounds. Brandon noted that while there have been some big discoveries — like uncovering previously misclassified fraud — the real value is the small stuff: firing off questions during meetings, validating numbers on the fly, double-clicking on any statistic without hunting for a dashboard. These tiny moments add up to substantially faster product cycles.

The impact: From 12 to 139 active users, 10.6x growth in data exploration

Since implementing Hex, Neo Financial has created over 4,000 Threads — 4,000 questions answered in minutes instead of days. After adding the Slack integration, 35% of those questions started in Slack.

And since adding the Slack integration, the number of active users grew from 12 to 139 people — a 10.6x increase in Explorer and Editor seats for individuals who could now ask questions and understand the data.

The transformation shows up everywhere. New product ideas and investigations are accelerated. Executives can dig into any number without hunting for the right dashboard. The fraud team can investigate anomalies in real-time.

For the data team, this shift means they're no longer a bottleneck. "Hex has added to our team's capacity. It allows people to ask questions when team members would’ve previously not bothered,” Brandon explained.

Furthermore, the data team's role is starting to shift from answering questions to monitoring quality, which is a much better use of their time. They can focus on ingesting new datasets and building better context instead of fielding the same questions on repeat, Brandon explained. And because every query runs under individual user credentials through OAuth, this viral adoption happened without compromising security or governance.

The results from Hex reflect Neo Financial's broader data philosophy: empower everyone with access to information, and they'll make better decisions faster. With Hex Threads enabling this level of data accessibility and speed, Neo Financial continues to maintain its competitive edge in Canada's fintech landscape.