Cloudera EVOLVE 2025 | Jide Adeoye, goeasy Ltd.

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Jide Adeoye

Director Business Intelligence

goeasy Ltd.

play_circle_outline Introduction of Jide Adeoye, Director of Business Intelligence at Goeasy LTD.

play_circle_outline Empowering Non-Prime Borrowers: Goeasy's Lending Solutions Through Easy Financial, Easy Home, and LendCare

play_circle_outline Importance of right data for effective business decisions and avoiding inaccuracies.

play_circle_outline Customer360 initiative to consolidate customer data across Goeasy's brands for better support.

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Jide Adeoye, goeasy Ltd.

Jide Adeoye

Director Business Intelligence goeasy Ltd.

In this exclusive interview for Cloudera EVOLVE25, theCUBE analyst Dave Vellante speaks with Jide Adeoye, director of business intelligence of goeasy Ltd., to explore how the company is helping Canadians in the non-prime finance space rebuild credit while driving growth. Adeoye outlines how goeasy’s graduation program and Credit Optimizer service guide customers toward healthier credit scores and lasting loyalty.

He shares how Octopai’s lineage and catalog tools cut root-cause analysis from weeks to hours and enabled a master KPI standardization effo... Read more

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Jide Adeoye, goeasy Ltd.

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Dave Vellante

>> Hi, everybody. Welcome back to New York City. We're here live at Cloudera Evolve. We're in Hell's Kitchen overlooking the water. It's getting a little better out there. It's been just wonderful views, and great day of content and discussions with practitioners and technologists. Jide Adeoye is here. He is the Director of Business Intelligence at Goeasy LTD, which is an alternative financial services firm. Jide, great to have you on.

Jide Adeoye

>> Thanks for having me, Dave. Really excited to be here.

Dave Vellante

>> We are excited to have you. Tell me more about Goeasy. Love the name.

Jide Adeoye

>> Yeah, we go easy, literally. Yes, like Riley said, Goeasy is a leader in the non-prime finance space in Canada. Essentially, what that means in layman's terms is that we lend money to people who are not able to lend from the bank because of their credit score. We work with them to be able to get their credit score back to a place where they can actually lend again from the prime market. We have three major brands that we used to do this: Easy Financial, Easy Home, and LendCare. Easy Financial, non-prime finance, two main products: unsecured and a secured personal loan. Then Easy Home is lease-to-own furniture and appliances. Essentially, you buy a house, you need some furniture, you need some appliances. You're in the non-prime space, you walk into one of our stores, you select whatever you want, and then we pay for it outright. Then you pay us biweekly or monthly until you're able to own it outright. Then last but not least, LendCare more on the B2B side, direct to merchant. We have over 11,000 merchants that we work with in the power sports space, auto, retail, and healthcare.

Dave Vellante

>> It seemed like when I was researching this conversation, I didn't know much about your business. I have great credit, so okay. But I said to myself, "Wow, this has got to be a great business because it's a huge underserved market, and I'm sure there's tons of people, for whatever reason." Their credit score drops and then the traditional banks say, "Don't touch them," but they're honest people, they want to get back. It has to be a phenomenal business. I don't know how large a business, but it's got to be a multi-tens of billions of dollars of business opportunity from a TAM standpoint.

Jide Adeoye

>> Absolutely, it's quite huge. A lot of customers that truly need money to be able to build back up their credit, and they're not able to get it from the traditional institutions that will give them loans or mortgages and so on and so forth. We're a safe haven for them to be able to come to, and most importantly for us is actually working with them. It's not just giving them the money and saying, "Go do what you need with it." It's actually helping them get back to healthy credit lifestyle.

Dave Vellante

>> Okay. Is that an integrated part of the service essentially?

Jide Adeoye

>> Yes, it is. We have what we call a graduation program, and the steps to that graduation program in terms of your credit score, where your credit score initially is at, what do you need to do to get it back up? We work with you to be able to get your credit score back up such that you have a good healthy credit lifestyle.

Dave Vellante

>> This is really interesting because a traditional lender is going to either say, "No loan for you," or it's going to say, "I'll give you a loan, but we're going to charge you more," and you may charge more as well, "but you're on your own."

Jide Adeoye

>> Exactly.

Dave Vellante

>> What you're doing is maybe there's a premium to pay to manage the risk, but you're helping the customer improve their credit score, which will help their rate over time. And then they would presumably stay with you, they become loyal to you, and not necessarily go to a traditional-

Jide Adeoye

>> Absolutely, and we've seen this because we have an ancillary product called Credit Optimizer. It used to be called Credit Monitoring, but we changed it to Credit Optimizer because we're doing both credit monitoring and also optimizing your credit as well. Through that product is essentially doing what we just said, being able to build back up your credit. Now what we found is after folks are able to build back up their credit, they still want to stay with us because of that, because we've actually helped them get there. We have some near-prime loans that we're also able to offer them for them to continue to have that healthy credit lifestyle because they know it's more than just us borrowing them the money. It's also us being there to support them all the way through.

Dave Vellante

>> Yeah, don't be discouraged if you have bad credit or no credit. Call Jide because they'll help you get through it. You can't do it overnight, but step by step, you can actually make big differences in your credit score.

Jide Adeoye

>> Exactly. Absolutely.

Dave Vellante

>> Okay. I understand you're a recent Cloudera customer. You guys came through the acquisition of Octopai.

Jide Adeoye

>> That's correct.

Dave Vellante

>> I'm interested in that, and I'm also interested in how you use analytics to reduce your risk, et cetera. But let's start with Octopai, which is the data lineage product and the metadata management. How do you use that? Now, we're going to get into what you're learning at Evolve from some of your colleagues, but let's start there.

Jide Adeoye

>> Absolutely. We've been with Octopai now for five years. Prior to having Octopai, we had issues with root cause impact analysis, as well as our data catalog. What used to happen is when we have certain data bugs or data issues, because of how a current data warehouse is structured, we had to go through multiple layers to be able to get to the root cause. Sometimes this could take days, it could even take weeks to be able to get to the root cause. Having Octopai on board has helped us to be able to streamline that because we can now see our full data lineage end-to-end at each layer. Essentially, you're able to trace it back all the way to the source. You're able to see all the different rules or transformations that have been put in place to be able to get to the actual field that is the issue. Through that, you're able to now look at your data, figure out where actually the problem was, and able to serve it within a matter of hours.

Dave Vellante

>> Are you technical by nature? Are you more business-oriented?

Jide Adeoye

>> Both.

Dave Vellante

>> Okay. I have a quasi technical question for you. You mentioned challenges with the data catalog. My question is you see data catalogs confusing situations and governance for a lot of customers. You have these proprietary data catalogs and they've been around forever. Now you've got them being open sourced, you've got that. Everybody wants open data, bring any compute to any data. You see the value shifting.

Jide Adeoye

>> That's right.

Dave Vellante

>> Everybody wants open, everybody wants to avoid lock-in, but this creates all this complexity. How are you thinking about that? How are you dealing with that? Do tools like Octopai help?

Jide Adeoye

>> Yeah, they help a lot. For us, we have a lot of PII data where we have a lot of confidential information for our customers, given that we're in finance. What Octopai helps us is to just be able to streamline those fields that are actually PII fields, and ensure that only the people that need to have access to those fields have access to it. What we used to go through from a catalog perspective was we weren't sure of all the different fields and key performance indicators that we had and how they're actually being used. With a data catalog component of Octopai, you actually see all of that. We now found out that we had four buckets of our KPIs. We had KPIs that had multiple definitions, so a single KPI that had maybe 10 definitions that are being used by 10 different teams. Then we had KPIs that were outdated.

Dave Vellante

>> A lot of arguments about that in the boardroom.

Jide Adeoye

>> Exactly. You can imagine. What used to happen, Dave, is my boss, for example, will go to a meeting, and then they'll say the chief marketing officer is in that meeting. They're presenting the same KPI but with different numbers. Yes, he gets a call after. They're like, "Today, why is my KPI this way?" I'm like, "You have two different business rules, which is it?" We had that bucket of KPI. We also had KPIs that were outdated that should have been decommissioned, that shouldn't even be used because of how our business has evolved. Also, KPIs that are outdated because of how our business has evolved, and we need to add additional rules to it to make it whole. Even new KPIs that we're not even using right now that we should be using to measure the performance of the business. With a data catalog component of Octopai, you're able to see all of that. This led us to do an exercise that we called master KPI standardization and rationalization where we get to the single source of truth that we didn't have prior to Octopai.

Dave Vellante

>> Does it help you with right-to-be-forgotten challenges?

Jide Adeoye

>> Yes, it does, it does in a vast, vast way. In so many instances whereby you see certain fields that have been there for 25 years, that you're like, "Okay, why is it still there?" From a legacy perspective, you're able to see a full listing view of what has been there that you need to actually work on to either eliminate or enhance essentially. Because as you know, when you build a data warehouse link, initially you're building it based on what you got and that point in time. Then over the years, you continue to pile up, you continue to pile up. It's like going to a mechanic, the mechanic tells you what the issue with your car is, and he's like, 'You got to pay five grand." You're like, "I don't have five grand. What can you do to patch it up?" Then he patches it up, but he tells you that you can only use this for one month, but you had to use it for one year. You keep patching up and patching up your data warehouse, and it has a lot of redundancy. Octopai really helps with that to be able to help you see what that redundancy is and how to eliminate the redundant data fields

Dave Vellante

>> With all that duct tape, it becomes gradual, Jide. I mean, it's one of those topics that some people might think it's boring, but it's super important. Are there other use cases that are driving business value for Goeasy with regard to just data, the lineage and the whole governance model?

Jide Adeoye

>> Yeah, the key thing is you cannot make effective business decisions without data. Actually, let me correct that, without the right data, because there's data everywhere.

Dave Vellante

>> Data is plentiful. Insights sometimes aren't.

Jide Adeoye

>> Exactly, but is it the right data, right? What used to happen prior to us getting Octopai was because certain data issues were not resolved and the executives need the data like yesterday, they will resort to using some other forms to be able to get that data leading to half-baked decisions which will most likely impact our growth and revenue. But with Octopai now, we're able to get faster to the root cause and resolve it, and get the data into the hands of the executives on time. With that, they're now able to make effective data-driven decisions leading to growth and profitability within the company. In general, this is what the data in NH2 helps with. We can see it because we're able to see the changes in the core KPIs that we have prior to where we got Octopai and after we got Octopai, how it has improved vastly. As a result of having a proper data lineage and catalog system in place, you're able to get faster to your data and make better-informed data-driven decisions.

Dave Vellante

>> As an industry analyst, which is my background, and I spent a lot of time with technology practitioners and companies, what I observe is the practitioners day to day, I mean, they're fighting the fight on the front lines. But a lot of times as analysts and technologists, which you're talking to engineering leaders, you're thinking about the future and what future architecture is going to look like. I'm interested in your perspectives as a BI practitioner. Maybe you don't spend a ton of time on this, but I'm sure you have conversations with your colleagues about where it's headed. You think about it, there's about a $50 billion business intelligence business that's been built up just to do metrics, dimensions, and dashboards. Now, you're in this AI era, there's shifts going on, you're seeing the data layer shift. We've been talking about that to Cloudera. These systems of intelligence are rising up, and the BI is like the system of engagement where there's metrics and dimensions. Our thinking is increasingly that systems of intelligence, the data platform, can interpret business context from those metrics and dimensions, and that whole stack is evolving. Do you think about that much, or is it your day-to-day? I'm interested in your thoughts as a practitioner as to where you see the vision of this whole data industry going?

Jide Adeoye

>> Go ahead. I think about that every day, every day. Honestly, with the evolution of AI, I mean, I think it's really great. Like I was saying to someone earlier today, AI does not replace common sense. It enhances common sense. People tend to forget the meaning of the A in the AI, which is artificial, not real intelligence. In other words, human input is still required for AI to be fully effective in what it does. For us, the main thing is the data behind AI, because AI is only as good as the data you give it. If the data is not properly structured, it's not going to be able to answer the questions you need it to answer. What our focus is is ensuring that whatever data we're providing for our AI capabilities is structured properly to be able to meet the business needs from an insights perspective. How we use it from a BI perspective is you have the dashboard still, but the dashboard gives you all the details at a glance. If you want more insights, that's where AI comes in where you're able to ask it certain questions based on the metrics/KPIs on the dashboard, and it can slice and dice further into those metrics, being able to give you answers that enable you to make the decisions you need to make. We look at it from an enhancement perspective, but with the focus of giving it the proper data structures to be able to handle the insights.

Dave Vellante

>> Can you paint a picture of your technology estate to whatever detail you're comfortable with: cloud, on-prem, combination, your BI tooling, what the rest of that data stack looks like? I know you're new to Cloudera with Octopai, but what's it look like? I'm interested in, to the extent that you can talk to, where you see it evolving.

Jide Adeoye

>> Yes. We're a Microsoft shop from a data perspective. Right now, we're on SQL Server, but we've currently embarked on a project that was called next-gen data architecture, which essentially is to transform our data architecture to have a new holistic enterprise and operational data architecture. Remember, the mechanic analogy earlier? That's essentially how our data warehouse is right now. We're currently embarking on that journey. Part of that journey, to start with, is to migrate the data we currently have to Azure. We have Azure Data Factory, we have Databricks, we have Synapse, so that's the first stage. And then the next stage will now be to do the complete re-architecture of all the enterprise and operational data, which is the future state. We want the architecture to be flexible and scalable. Right now, our current architecture isn't. Because of that, we've had to patch and patch and patch such that from a BI perspective, we have over 600 BI data processors that we had to build on top of our current data warehouse to be able to function on our dashboards and reports. The future that we see is having a flexible and scalable data architecture such that when we have additional sources, we're able to easily integrate those sources into our data architecture to be able to meet our data needs.

Dave Vellante

>> You're a Power BI shop?

Jide Adeoye

>> MicroStrategy.

Dave Vellante

>> Oh, no kidding?

Jide Adeoye

>> Yeah.

Dave Vellante

>> You own Bitcoin?

Jide Adeoye

>> Not yet. Actually, I should correct that.

Dave Vellante

>> Every time you renew the license, they should throw in a couple of Bitcoins.

Jide Adeoye

>> Exactly. I should correct that. Actually, it's now called Strategy.

Dave Vellante

>> Yes, yes.

Jide Adeoye

>> It's called Strategy because of the Bitcoins. Michael Saylor wanted both the BI/AI and the Bitcoin side represented.

Dave Vellante

>> I used to compete against MicroStrategy. They were a world-class product, and still good and robust. Interesting. Okay, cool. Yeah, so you don't own Bitcoin?

Jide Adeoye

>> I don't have much, though I've been encouraged to get some shares. We'll see how that works.

Dave Vellante

>> What an amazing transformation of a company, though.

Jide Adeoye

>> I know. I think Bitcoin now is almost over a hundred-

Dave Vellante

>> It's well over a hundred thousand. We've been hanging around 114,000. Yeah, pretty cool.

Jide Adeoye

>> That's enough for a down payment.

Dave Vellante

>> That's right. Amazing. All right. Anyway, I'll give you the last word, maybe some of the conversations you've been having with some of your peers here. Anything else you want to share about what you're working on and what excites you?

Jide Adeoye

>> Yeah. Currently, we're working on a couple of use cases for the Strategy AI chatbot. We're working on being able to provide our frontline staff with the ability to be able to see payments returned daily faster. Right now, it's very, very manually driven where they're combining a lot of data from different data sources to get to the list, and then call the customers because of insufficient funds, the payments were returned, and to be able to get the payments from the customers. Currently right now, we're working on automating that process, building the data model to automate that process, and then put in the chatbot over it. We actually just started last week doing approval concept, and it's going well. Then there are a number of other use cases where we want to consolidate our customer data. We're calling that Customer360. Because of the three brands we have, Easy Financial, Easy Home, and LendCare, we have some customers across all three brands or customers across two, or just customers that are in one brand. We want to be able to know the suite of products they have, so we know how we can better support them in enhancing those products or even offering them new products that will help them build back up their credit. We're currently working on consolidating that data model, and we will have some AI capabilities as well with that AI model.

Dave Vellante

>> So that a customer is a customer, not three customers.

Jide Adeoye

>> Exactly.

Dave Vellante

>> Awesome. Jide, it's really a pleasure having you on.

Jide Adeoye

>> It's a pleasure. Thank you.

Dave Vellante

>> Thanks so much. All right. Thank you for watching. This is Dave Vellante for the entire CUBE team at Cloudera Evolve 2025 from New York City. We'll be right back right after this short break.