Reinventing BI: How IAG Loyalty Modernized Analytics with Self-Service Data Apps

IAG Loyalty is a pioneer in the loyalty industry with over 30 years of experience. It's home to British Airways Holidays, The Wine Flyer and Avios - the loyalty currency of British Airways, Iberia, Aer Lingus, Vueling, Qatar Airways, Finnair and Loganair. With a vision to create the world's most rewarding experiences, IAG Loyalty enables more than 69 million members worldwide to collect and redeem Avios through a diverse range of partners spanning retail, travel and financial services.

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As a data-rich business, the ability to extract insights quickly and empower teams with analytics is essential to delivering better customer experiences and optimizing program performance.

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Historically, data at IAG Loyalty could be complex to access as it was available in many places. Since 2023, IAG Loyalty has been working to simplify its data ecosystem, focusing on how teams are set up and organised, how things are done and the underlying technology, by adopting modern tooling. 

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As part of this journey, IAG Loyalty sought a modern, cloud-native approach that would become infinitely scalable, decouple data logic from the front end, and enable true self-service analytics. By reducing dependencies and taking total ownership, the company could empower teams with faster time-to-insight, increase agility in decision-making, and foster a more data-driven culture and decision-making.

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Breaking free from legacy BI

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Like many companies, data logic was embedded directly into dashboards, leading to fragmented versions of the truth and making governance a challenge. As data volumes grew, performance suffered, with slow loading times and inefficient processing creating bottlenecks that hindered both iteration speed and overall efficiency.

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“The way we’d done things in the past meant that accessing data via self-serve could sometimes be slow for colleagues, clunky, and difficult to use or manage” said Chanade Hemming, Head of Data Products at IAG Loyalty. “The logic was locked inside the existing BI tool, making it harder for people to collaborate or iterate quickly.”

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To solve these issues, IAG Loyalty adopted a modern, cloud-native approach—separating data processing from visualization.

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“We completely decoupled the logic from the front end, moving it into Snowflake,” Hemming explained. “Now, Astrato acts as the shop window for everything happening in Snowflake, while all computation and governance remain in code within our data warehouse. That means anyone can access insights that are certified by our teams that have taken total ownership for the data powering them.” 

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This shift—known as “Shifting Left”—brought governance and data processing closer to the source, ensuring a centrally managed, single source of truth within Snowflake. With Astrato focusing solely on the presentation layer via a no-code, business-friendly UI, employees at all skill levels can now consume, visualize, and analyze data independently, while collaborating seamlessly.

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“Astrato stands out as a powerful data visualisation and self-serve platform, offering seamless data connectivity that is both easy to set up and configure. Its integration with Snowflake ensures strong data governance and control, allowing organisations to manage their data securely and efficiently,” explained James Stewart, Data Tech Lead – Data Products at IAG Loyalty. 

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The impact has been profound. Marketing teams can now explore and act on data themselves—without relying on technical colleagues. What once took weeks of back-and-forth now happens in hours & minutes, with the added assurance of centrally managed permissions, security, and trust in the data model.

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Previously, business teams had to wait for analysts to extract, process, and visualize data, often delaying decision-making by days or even weeks. Now, near real-time, cloud-native analytics ensure insights are always fresh, accessible, and instantly actionable.

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A new era: cloud BI and AI-ready analytics
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Traditional BI tools often bundle data logic, processing, and visualization into a single platform, making it difficult to scale, govern, and optimize analytics workflows. Headless BI takes a different approach—by decoupling data processing from visualization, it provides greater flexibility, improved governance, and real-time insights that traditional systems struggle to deliver.

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IAG Loyalty didn’t just want to replace an old tool, they wanted to rethink analytics entirely. They adopted a modern approach, keeping data logic centralized in Snowflake while making insights instantly accessible through Astrato.

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This shift had profound implications:
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• Data products replaced static dashboards – interactive, governed, and built for decision-making, owned by the teams who understand the data best.
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• Self-service analytics became a reality – no steep learning curves, no gatekeeping.1 in 3 monthly users are using Astrato daily.
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• AI-ready architecture with Snowflake’s LLMs– structured, governed data meant Astrato’s built-in AI capabilities could surface trends in real time.
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“Astrato is the execution layer. Everything is computed in Snowflake, where all datasets are aggregated and processed. We then layer visualization on top. It’s almost like a headless architecture—decoupling logic from the visualization product,” says Hemming. “In the past, various tools and teams’ implementation of them buried logic within dashboards, making it difficult for anyone else to pick up or modify. Now, everything is centralized, transparent, and accessible.”
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Empowering teams with self-service

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True self-service means more than just giving people access to data—it requires an intuitive experience that encourages exploration. Astrato made it easy for teams to build, interact with, and iterate on their own insights without needing a BI specialist.

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“You don’t need any specialist certification to use Astrato,” says Hemming. “The speed at which you can deliver is much greater. If you’re not a specialist in some of the older BI tools, it’s a really big learning curve. But with Astrato, our team got up to speed quickly.”
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With Astrato, time to insights has been drastically reduced—from weeks to just days—allowing teams to act faster and make data-driven decisions with confidence. This ease of use fostered a new culture of data ownership and innovation. 
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“Astrato has streamlined my work and boosted efficiency across the business. Its user-friendly interface makes dashboard creation effortless, even for beginners,” – said Shaie Rahulan, Data Analyst - Data Products, IAG Loyalty. “With built-in AI support, issues are quickly resolved. Since using it, engagement has surged, with more people exploring trends, sharing insights and recommending it to other departments.” 
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The team created internal champions—super users who helped others get up to speed, providing feedback that directly influenced Astrato’s product roadmap.
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‍“We’ve built a real community around it,” Hemming adds. “Constant feedback, iteration, sharing tips—we didn’t really have that kind of excitement with some of our legacy tools.”

A new approach to data: agile, product-driven, and scalable

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The shift to a modern data infrastructure didn’t just improve reporting—it changed the role of data teams within the business. Rather than functioning as a service organization that responded to ad-hoc reporting requests, IAG Loyalty’s data team evolved into a product-driven, agile operation that delivers scalable, reusable data products at speed.
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This transformation was made possible by full-stack data teams, which operate in value streams aligned to specific business areas.
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‍“We have value stream aligned product teams”, explains Hemming. “Each team is an extension of business teams and is responsible for continuously delivering value, by focusing on the right things.”

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By integrating product management principles with data engineering, IAG Loyalty has fostered a culture of rapid iteration.
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‍“We don’t spend months building something in isolation. Instead, we start small, validate with users, and iterate,” Hemming says. “For example, a self-service product in Astrato might launch with a simple but powerful set of features in days, and then we enhance it based on real feedback.”

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This agile mindset wasn’t possible with legacy BI tools.
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‍“Previously, a single project could take months to complete because everything was locked inside the visualization layer,” Hemming explains. “Now, we’ve decoupled the logic, which allows us to move much more quickly than before.”

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Hemming summarizes the impact:
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‍“The more insights we make available to our colleagues—and the easier they are to digest—the better decisions they’re going to make.”

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Proving the value: a data-driven marketing pilot

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To validate their new approach, IAG Loyalty ran a proof of concept with their Marketing Team, one of the most data-hungry teams in the business. The goal was clear: make campaign performance insights faster, easier, and more actionable.
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“We made marketing response data available in Snowflake and made it usable,” says Hemming. “We started simply with things like sends, opens, clicks, unsubscribes. Then, we modeled that data and put a self-serve layer on top of it. Since then we’ve built attribution in, so teams can see the customer & commercial impact of the activity.”

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This simple but strategic shift yielded immediate results.
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‍“In the past, marketing campaign insights could have taken weeks or months to derive—‘what did that campaign look like? How well did it do?’—we were able to build an initial view of a campaign and enable colleagues to see performance within 48 hours of the campaign being sent. It was a huge transformation for the team.”

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The positive impact was echoed by others in the business:

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“We’ve seen a significant shift in our ability to gather and analyse insights. With richer data at our fingertips, we now have a deeper understanding of our partners, enabling us to make more informed, data-driven decisions.” – Georgia, Retail Lead - Commercial, IAG Loyalty
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The future: expanding data apps and intelligent insights

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“Before switching to a modern data stack, including the likes of Astrato and Snowflake, we struggled with high-quality data being available and usable, data colleagues being able to do their best work without complexity, and multiplying the value through reuse and exploiting what we’ve built. ‍It slowed us down and impacted time-to-insight, which has gone from weeks/months to days/hours.

Now, we’re able to provide colleagues with insights at their fingertips to drive better decisions—and we’re already seeing colleague satisfaction increase and more decisions being data-informed. Our data colleagues especially love Astrato for ease of use and reusability, and business colleagues love Astrato for the user experience, speed, performance and ability to see iterations sooner”, – shared Chanade Hemming. 

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James Stewart, Data Tech Lead – Data Products, IAG Loyalty, added:

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“Astrato’s technical support has been exceptional. Their team has played a crucial role in assisting tech leads with the configuration and setup of the platform while also providing invaluable support to dashboard builders. Whether it’s troubleshooting, optimising performance, or guiding users through best practices, Astrato’s support team ensures that users have everything they need to create high-quality, impactful products for our business leaders.”
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Looking ahead, IAG Loyalty will continue to build on its success with self-service data applications—live, interactive experiences that go beyond traditional dashboards. Instead of just presenting historical data, these data apps could help teams act in the moment.
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Another area of focus is enhancing anomaly detection, using AI to identify trends and anomalies in data and making these insights more accessible through Astrato's intuitive visualization layer. 
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By integrating AI-powered anomaly detection with self-service analytics, IAG Loyalty can streamline how teams detect and respond to unusual patterns, ensuring faster, more informed decision-making. For example, teams can quickly identify unexpected drops in customer engagement or surges in campaign response rates, helping them act proactively rather than reactively.
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Final thoughts

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IAG Loyalty’s journey wasn’t just about reviewing its BI platforms. It was about fundamentally modernizing their data infrastructure and redefining how data is used across the business. With a cloud-native, Headless BI approach, self-service is no longer a myth, and AI-ready insights are now within reach.
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“We’ve moved from dashboards to decision-making,” says Hemming. “And we’re just getting started.”

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