Project Overview
About Birchstone and their business relationship with tickl.
Birchstone is a London-based financial services company specialising in currency risk management, cash management and commercial finance. They were acquired in 2025 by Marex, a Nasdaq-listed company with total assets exceeding $24 billion.
tickl’s engagement with Birchstone began in 2023, addressing data quality and fragmentation issues, before expanding to include a BI reporting and analytics project.
The Challenge
The challenges faced by Birchstone before tickl intervened.
When we began working with Birchstone, their CRM, trading and survey data was siloed across multiple systems and spreadsheets. Without a unified view of their data, Birchstone lacked proper visibility over their KPIs and team performance. In addition, data quality issues were challenging to identify, and so often went unresolved, undermining confidence in the reliability of their data.
Data integration: We started by building a data model that integrated Birchstone’s disparate data sources, automating the feed of any data stored in Excel spreadsheets to reduce friction and save time.
Data quality: We created data hygiene reports that identified errors in the data, classified the errors by type, and identified which team members were responsible. We then gamified the process of remediating those errors (and maintaining data quality going forward) by creating a dashboard with a league table ranking team members by number of errors outstanding.
BI Reporting: We then leveraged the integrated data model to create a series of dashboards that tracked KPIs and the performance of different team members against metrics relevant to their specific role in real-time. We also added a security layer so that users could view data at both an aggregated and granular level (to provide transparency and assist them in their day-to-day work), but couldn’t see data that wasn’t relevant to their role or their clients.
In the Words of The Client
"Integral Dashboards & Analytics..."
“It has been a pleasure working with the team at tickl. They are responsive, smart and very helpful. They have delivered integral dashboards and analytics, understood the complexity of our data, and maintained the security standards we need.”
James Arnold, Founder & CEO, Birchstone
Project Outcomes
Data hygiene reports that serve as a comprehensive to-do-list for each team member, classifying data errors, explaining why they exist, and creating accountability for addressing them. Within a week of the reports going live, hundreds of previously unidentified data quality issues had been reduced to zero.
All CRM, trading and survey data integrated and visible in one place, with a suite of dashboards providing real-time performance insight for both the business and team members.
In combination, this enabled Birchstone to see what was happening across their business, with complete confidence in the accuracy of the underlying data.
