First Hawaiian Bank unlocks real-time reporting and customer 360

“At First Hawaiian Bank, everything we do starts with our customers and communities. Fivetran helps us bring our customer, operational, and financial data together faster and more reliably, so our teams can make smarter decisions and create more personalized experiences for the people we serve.”
— Rosemary Peh, Head of Data & Analytics at First Hawaiian Bank

Founded in 1858, First Hawaiian Bank (FHB) is Hawaii’s oldest and largest financial institution, serving individuals and businesses across Hawaii, Guam, and Saipan. With a legacy of trust and community leadership, FHB offers diversified financial services spanning deposits, lending, and wealth management.

Today, the bank is evolving how it uses data to power smarter decision-making, deepen customer relationships, and accelerate personalized experiences. To achieve their vision, FHB set out to modernize their data & analytics infrastructure, replacing outdated processes that slowed decision-making and limited the organization's ability to scale.

The challenges

Slow, manual pipelines delayed access to critical data

On-prem batch jobs, hand-coded SQL, and rigid SFTP processes were slow, error-prone, and required heavy manual monitoring and intervention. Onboarding new data sources often took weeks or months, delaying access to customer, operational, and financial data needed for timely reporting and decision-making. The lack of reliable automation also created governance gaps and made it difficult to track changes or enforce standards.

Limited scalability constrained long-term analysis

On-prem databases frequently hit storage limits, forcing teams to purge historical data, which limited long-term financial modeling and time-series analysis. Rigid file-based integrations also made it difficult to adapt quickly or add new fields without vendor involvement that came at a premium cost. Inconsistent ingestion processes also made maintaining clean, governed data difficult at scale.

Fragmented systems created siloed customer views

Core banking systems — including loans, deposits, mortgages, credit cards, and wealth management — operated independently, with no easily attained unified customer view. This fragmentation limited cross-sell opportunities, reduced cross-functional impact visibility, hindered operational efficiency across the enterprise, and resulted in lost opportunity revenue.

High operational overhead for a lean team

Previously, data ingestion was being handled via traditional ETL capabilities that are more suited for batch application integration. They were spending disproportionate time maintaining and troubleshooting data pipelines, which impacted data reliability, compliance, and the bank’s ability to support near real-time reporting or advance AI/ML initiatives. They needed a more reliable and automated way of handling everyday pipeline tasks so they could focus on building better customer experiences. 

Finding the right solution: Fivetran, dbt, and Snowflake

To modernize its data and analytics ecosystem, First Hawaiian Bank selected Fivetran as the foundation for automated, governed data movement across on-prem and cloud systems specifically for data & analytics workloads. Fivetran now handles end-to-end data movement and management for Oracle, SQL Server, Salesforce, Amazon S3, and other core applications — eliminating the brittle, manual workflows that previously slowed access to critical data.

With fully managed connectors, automated schema drift handling, and consistent ingestion schedules, Fivetran ensures that business-critical customer, operational, and financial data flows reliably into Amazon S3 and ultimately into Snowflake. Once Fivetran loads the raw data, FHB’s data team uses dbt to transform, harmonize, and model datasets into a single, trusted and integrated view of the customer and their transactions on Snowflake.

“We used to spend weeks setting up new data sources — with Fivetran, we can now do it in days. The pipelines just run, even while we’re asleep. That kind of automation gives us peace of mind and lets us focus on delivering value.”
— Michael Lawrence Gallagher, Data Product Delivery Manager at First Hawaiian Bank

To strengthen governance and repeatability, data engineers deploy all connectors as code with Terraform, ensuring consistency across environments, full auditability, and significantly reduced operational overhead.

Together, this modernized stack allows FHB to deliver trusted, near-real-time data to internal BI tools — giving business teams fast, self-serve access to insights.

The Fivetran team provided hands-on support throughout the transition, giving FHB the confidence and foundation to build a scalable, governed, and analytics-ready data platform.

“The Fivetran team feels like an extension of ours. Whenever we hit a roadblock, they jump in immediately. That partnership has been key to keeping us on track and moving fast.”
— Michael Lawrence Gallagher, Data Product Delivery Manager at First Hawaiian Bank

The impact: Faster insights and customer 360

By automating ingestion from Salesforce, core banking systems, and other applications, Fivetran ensures that all upstream data powering dbt models is reliable, timely, and complete. That consistency enables FHB to build unified customer views, accelerate reporting, and empower teams with insights that were previously out of reach.

With trusted, integrated data available in Snowflake:

• Designated management and analytics teams now access data and dashboards 66% faster, improving visibility into leads, opportunities, conversions, and operational performance.
• Data engineering timelines were reduced, building new data source pipelines dropped from 12 weeks to 1 week, and complex sources like Salesforce went from 6 months to 1 week.
• Retail planning, marketing, wholesale and wealth teams can now explore data independently, track performance in near-real time, and uncover insights without relying on data engineering for every step along the way.

These improvements are already reshaping how FHB operates:

• A unified, governed data foundation enables faster, and more flexible operational financial reporting.
• Faster turnaround on business requests and improved coordination across teams.
• Consistent, automated pipelines that reduce manual maintenance, operational risk, and compliance overhead.
• Data engineers can stand up new connectors in days, accelerating time to insight across the organization.

By the end of 2025, Fivetran will have consolidated 80% of FHB’s first-party data across 7 core data domains (customer, digital, mortgage, business services, cards, wealth, and finance) into Snowflake, supporting enterprise-wide analytics and future AI initiatives.

With much of the operational burden reduced, FHB’s data teams can now focus more on advanced analytics and AI — including predictive modeling, customer segmentation, credit risk modeling, and personalized product recommendations — all built on the reliable pipelines that Fivetran enables.

Looking ahead

As an early adopter of Fivetran Managed Data Lake Service, FHB is evaluating new ways to future-proof its architecture by landing data directly into Amazon S3 using Iceberg tables for better interoperability. This approach would give the bank complete control of its raw data, reduce Snowflake storage costs, and enable query-on-read access for long-term retention and audit needs. It also strengthens data sovereignty and helps the bank avoid vendor lock-in — an important consideration for a regulated financial institution.

These initiatives will help FHB deepen customer relationships, improve risk management, and deliver more tailored experiences across the communities it serves.

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