Building a Data Vault at Oodle

At the 2023 Data Vault Conference, Mustafa Rhemtulla shared Oodle Car Finance’s real-world journey implementing Data Vault 2.0. If you missed the session, here’s your friendly recap—and a reminder to join our forum to keep the conversation going!

About Oodle Car Finance

Founded in 2016, Oodle is the UK’s fastest-growing motor finance company, serving over 150,000 customers and partnering with 300+ dealers. With a Trustpilot score of 4.7 and a team of 400+, Oodle’s mission is to make car buying and ownership easy, supportive, and accessible for everyone.

Why Data Vault? The Business Case

Oodle needed a modern data platform to:

• Improve data governance, quality, and security

• Enable timely business performance measurement and self-service analytics

• Support regulatory compliance and reduce risk

• Scale efficiently and support advanced analytics and machine learning

Their existing infrastructure was holding them back—so they turned to Data Vault 2.0 for its agility, business-centric design, auditability, and modularity.

The Target Platform

Oodle selected a low-code, SQL-based platform stack (Snowflake, Fivetran, dbt, Castor, Tableau) for:

• Fast data ingestion and transformation

• Out-of-the-box data quality and lineage features

• Seamless integration and self-serve analytics

• Low cost of ownership and easy scalability. [Mustafa Rh...Vault V2 | PDF]

Delivery Approach: Collaborative and Agile

The delivery framework brought together data architects, engineers, and analysts in a shared, collaborative process:

• Design Raw Vault: Concept modeling, data profiling, and glossary building

• Build Raw Vault: Source-to-target mapping, ETL with dbt, quality review, and release

• Define Business Requirements: Capturing and specifying data products

• Build Data Products: Business vault modeling, info marts, lineage, and quality review.

Achievements & Impact

• Performance: New platform is 5x faster, with 45% lower infrastructure costs

• Business Value: Improved scorecard models, more accurate loss provisioning, and 8% increase in funded loans

• Adoption: 30+ new Tableau dashboards, 400+ legacy dashboards retired, and 1,600 data tables managed

• Automation: 30% of users now provide open banking consent, enabling automated income verification

• User Feedback: Teams report faster analytics, improved data quality, and greater confidence in business decisions.

Key Takeaways

• Focus on a business view of data, not just systems

• Use Data Vault experts to fast-track delivery, especially with small teams

• Regularly review and address technical debt—Data Vault makes change and rebuilds easier

• Capture business rules in the business vault, not scattered across dashboards

• Involve stakeholders early for adoption and business champions

• Use behavior-driven development (BDD) to enforce business rules and build trust in data.

Join the Data Community!

• Sign up to our forum: Share your experiences, ask questions, and connect with fellow data enthusiasts.

• Stay up to date: We host regular webinars, workshops, and meetups—don’t miss out!

• Shape the future: Your feedback and participation help us build better tools and resources for everyone.

Final Thoughts

Oodle’s journey shows that with the right approach, tools, and community, you can transform your data platform, accelerate business value, and build a foundation for future innovation. Ready to start your own Data Vault journey? Join the conversation, sign up for our next webinar, and let’s build the future of data together!