Complementing Clip’s Regulatory Reporting with Data-Driven Precision

Executive Summary

In 2024, Clip faced a pivotal challenge: generating regulator-ready reports for Mexico’s financial authorities with the accuracy and consistency required for full compliance. Key issues included inconsistent data definitions, reconciliation gaps, and persistent data quality concerns.

To address these obstacles, Clip partnered with Mutt Data to architect and implement a robust, automated regulatory reporting infrastructure built on Databricks’ Data Intelligence Platform, leveraging features such as Delta Lake, Delta Live Tables, and Unity Catalog for data governance, lineage, and auditability. Over the course of three quarters, the initiative evolved into a strategic collaboration—aligning legal, accounting, and engineering teams to standardize data definitions, enhance data quality, and accelerate reporting processes.

As a result, Clip achieved a tenfold reduction in report generation and validation time—from 15 days to just 2—delivering 90% time savings per report. This translated into a cumulative reduction of 27 days across the reporting cycle, significantly enhancing both speed and accuracy in compliance operations.

About the Company

Clip is a leading digital payment and commerce enablement platform in Mexico, offering tailored digital payment solutions for both individuals and businesses.

Additionally, Clip has an electronic payment fund institution called “PocketGroup Technologies, S.A. de C.V., Institución de Fondos de Pago Electrónico” (PocketGroup) and is subject to stringent regulatory oversight and must regularly submit both scheduled and ad hoc reports to authorities including CNBV, Banxico, and CONDUSEF, underscoring the company’s commitment to transparency and regulatory compliance.

The Challenge

Clip and PocketGroup needed to deliver precise, automated reports in line with increasingly complex regulatory requirements from CNBV, Banxico, and CONDUSEF.

A key challenge was ensuring alignment between internal systems and external reports—such as STP account statements—amid evolving regulations and varying interpretations of reporting criteria.

At the time, Clip lacked a centralized framework to consistently define core entities such as valid users, accounts, or transaction types. Legal, compliance, accounting, and data teams faced challenges around coordination and operational efficiency.The reporting process was largely manual, with ad hoc SQL queries—factors that made scaling difficult.

Clip’s data environment reflected the complexities of integrating legacy systems acquired through PocketGroup acquisition. These legacy user records were stored in unstructured MongoDB sources and occasionally included inconsistencies—requiring careful handling during integration. As a result, the reporting logic needed to account for legacy cases with specific validation rules. While teams had deep domain expertise, limited bandwidth.

Mutt Data stepped in and led collaborative working sessions, bridged departmental silos, and translated fragmented data into actionable, regulator-ready outputs. The core challenge wasn’t just engineering pipelines—it was aligning teams around a shared foundation of understanding and structure.

The Solution

To tackle these challenges, Mutt Data partnered closely with Clip’s data, legal, product, and finance teams to implement a robust and repeatable regulatory reporting process using Databricks Lakehouse architecture. A foundational milestone was the creation of more than 55 formal business definitions.

The engagement began with a comprehensive audit of Clip’s data ecosystem. This included unmigrated accounts, and legacy transaction handling and business logic challenges, such as defining a valid user based on CURP (Mexico’s national ID), account activity, or onboarding status.

A foundational milestone clarifying critical entities such as digital accounts, former PocketGroupusers, account statuses, transaction types (real vs. virtual), and reconciliation rules for scenarios like fraud and overfunding. These definitions were developed through cross-functional workshops and served as the cornerstone for automated data validation. From a technical perspective, modular SQL pipelines were built to accurately calculate balances across fragmented systems.

Mutt Data also implemented a new ingestion pipeline to extract essential information from a previously siloed MongoDB instance into Databricks staging data into Delta Lake tables and configuring Delta Live Tables for managed ingestion and validation. Using Unity Catalog, the team enforced data access controls and centralized metadata governance—ensuring audit‑ready lineage and consistency across all regulatory data assets. These pipelines replaced manual processes, dramatically improving speed and reliability.

The solution also addressed inconsistencies within Salesforce and the MongoDB-to-Databricks ingestion flow, correcting missing records and eliminating erroneous data sources. Invalid records tied to former PocketGroup users were cleaned and validated, and a comprehensive documentation package was delivered, detailing all tables and processes relevant to regulatory reporting.

To support governance and audit readiness, each process was fully documented, anomalies were flagged and explained, and final reports were validated against the latest regulatory APIs and submission formats.

Over the course of 85+ working sessions, Clip and Mutt Data not only resolved legacy data challenges but also established a scalable, future-ready reporting system designed to evolve alongside regulatory and business demands.

To summarize:

Defining the Rules

• Documented 55+ business definitions, including criteria for valid users, accounts, and balances.
• Unified taxonomy for former PocketGroup and Digital Account users, integrating legal, compliance, and finance perspectives.
• Building the Engine
• Developed scalable SQL queries to aggregate data from fragmented systems (including fraud, frozen funds, unmigrated accounts, etc.).
• Ingested MongoDB data into Databricks for streamlined reporting.
• Applied validation logic to detect anomalies, map to CNBV formats, and filter non-compliant records.
• Coordinating the Effort
• Conducted 85+ collaborative sessions across departments.
• Created dashboards and documentation for auditing and governance.

The Results

The Clip–Mutt Data collaboration delivered measurable improvements in data integrity, reporting accuracy, and operational efficiency. By combining deep engineering rigor with effective cross-functional coordination, Clip now operates with a fully automated, auditable regulatory reporting system.

Key outcomes include:

Additional Achievements

• 70% of required reports are now fully automated and integrated into the standardized reporting framework
• 10 regulatory reports developed and delivered
• 55 formal business definitions documented and implemented, specific to PocketGroup
• Identified and addressed 10+ root causes of reconciliation discrepancies
• Addressed and standardized Salesforce records, improving data quality across 33% of the total volume
• Remediated former PocketGroup user records representing 18% of total volume
• Held 60+ working sessions to analyze and resolve reconciliation issues
• Conducted 25+ sessions to align on standardized PocketGroup user definitions
• Integrated 11 MongoDB tables into production-grade Databricks schemas

Operational Impact & Cost Efficiency

Based on internal estimates and assuming a blended hourly rate of USD $40, the time savings achieved through this initiative have translated into meaningful operational efficiencies and cost reductions. These figures are illustrative, grounded in conservative assumptions, and underscore the strategic value of investing in automation and standardization.

Estimated Efficiency Gains

PocketGroup Report Optimization

Automation of the most complex report—PocketGroup—reduced annual processing time by approximately 30 hours, yielding an estimated USD $1,200 in direct cost savings.

Report Construction Efficiency

Across all reports, streamlined generation and validation processes saved approximately 27 business days, or 216 hours, equating to USD $8,640 in reduced technical effort.

Improved Cross-Functional Coordination

Enhanced data accuracy and accessibility minimized back-and-forth between data and accounting teams. This alignment is estimated to save 2 business days per month, or 192 hours annually, delivering an additional USD $7,680 in indirect efficiency gains.

Total Estimated Operational Savings: USD $17,520 Annually

While actual savings may vary depending on team composition and rate assumptions, these results clearly demonstrate the tangible ROI of investing in regulatory automation and cross-functional alignment.

Beyond these milestones, Mutt Data also played a pivotal role in navigating two high-pressure external audit processes.

In April 2025, Clip received an unanticipated and complex reporting request from CNBV, accompanied by aggressive deadlines. Mutt Data quickly mobilized cross-functional coordination, adapted reporting definitions, and delivered the required documentation under intense time constraints. Just one month later, a second request arrived—this time with only three days to respond. Once again, the team delivered on time and at the expected level of precision and quality.

These successful audit responses not only validated the maturity and resilience of the reporting system but also underscored Mutt Data’s full operational ownership and reliability under pressure.

Wrap up

What began as a regulatory requirement evolved into a strategic transformation. With Mutt Data’s deep expertise, Clip transitioned from a fragmented, manual reporting process to a unified, scalable, and audit-ready system. This case underscores the power of rigorous data engineering and the value of cross-functional alignment—demonstrating how compliance, when approached proactively, can become a lasting operational advantage.