About Us

RDI stands for Roberts Data Insights, founded by Merlyn Roberts in 2018.  We began as a boutique consulting firm, primarily serving the ~190 Credit Unions and the broader Financial Services industry in Canada.  We also established the Cascadia Financial Analytics Forum to promote collaboration among community-focused financial institutions in North America.

In addition to the core team members below, RDI partners with other independent contractors, consultants and agencies.

Expanding Our Services

In recent years, we've expanded our offerings to include analytics and planning in other areas, catering to Customer Experience & Customer Service, Human Resources, Finance, and IT functions across multiple industries.

Merlyn Roberts, Founder

Merlyn founded RDI in 2018, building up its client base across Canada and operations. 

In 2025, he stepped away from the operations of the business to lead an analytics practice at a leading Canadian credit union. 

He is a senior business analytics leader with 20 years of diverse, in-depth, international experience delivering business value through the eras of Business Intelligence, Big Data Analytics, and Data Science. Born and raised in London, UK, Merlyn lives in North Vancouver with his wife and two sons and enjoys running, playing vinyl records and fishing.

Jeff Sawers, Senior Analytics Consultant and Practice Lead, Data Architecture and Business Intelligence 

Jeff has spent over 20 years designing and building innovative analytics solutions across several industries and business divisions. He is also a passionate educator focused on maturing the use of enterprise data and analytics for more informed decision making. To ensure enterprise data capabilities evolve and are sustained over time, he prefers simple solutions, developed using a consultative approach, that combine the best of technology, data, architecture, and people within an organization. Born and raised in Greater Vancouver, Jeff resides in Port Coquitlam with his lovely wife and takes every opportunity to be up in the mountains skiing and hiking.

Praveen Duggimpudi, Lead, Data Warehousing and Development


Praveen has a decade of experience as a Business Intelligence Developer and Data-warehousing Specialist using a variety of technologies/BI stacks/Azure, working with data right at the source, through ETL and database/warehouse, and delivery to end users through cubes, reports and data visualization tools. He has worked in Financial Services, Retail, Pharma and Non-Profit sectors, helping clients to migrate between reporting platforms, data pipelines, and core systems, minimizing disruption to business end users. Praveen lives in Toronto with his wife and daughter and enjoys playing volleyball and biking.




Jennifer Kelley, Director and Practice Lead, Workforce Planning & Analytics


Jen has over two decades of program and change management experience leading workforce transformations and implementations in large private and public sector enterprises. Specialized in helping HR be a more strategic function to the business, she has built and led client-facing consulting teams and managed customer revenue streams at two successful HR technology startups (one "unicorn", and one recently acquired).  In North America, the UK and Europe she has worked in a broad range of sectors-- including Energy, Financial Services, Pharma, Software, Non-Profit and Government. Based in Vancouver with her family, she loves boating, nordic skiing and travelling.