AboutDane Pinney
Data translator, problem-solver, and database designer.
Biography
Dane Pinney is a data translator, problem-solver, and database designer who makes complicated information easier to understand and act upon to solve problems. His career has repeatedly placed him between business and IT—translating executive questions into technical requirements, technical limitations into practical choices, and analytical results into language that engineers, sales teams, executives, and auditors can use.
His interest in numbers began early. After discovering the actuarial profession in an occupational handbook at his elementary-school library, Dane decided that mathematics offered both an intellectual challenge and a promising career. College courses in econometrics and money and banking expanded that interest into statistics, economics, and finance. Graduating in 2009—and discovering that actuarial exams were considerably less charming than their salary projections—redirected him into automotive consulting, where his enthusiasm for data and learning became the foundation of his career.
Today, Dane builds DaneDoesData.com and contributes to consulting projects. Dane Does Data brings together his interests in analytical problem-solving, software development, visual communication, and personal finance.
Experience
Across more than 15 years in automotive, consumer lending, and financial services, Dane has worked inside IT, alongside IT in a data center of excellence, and primarily on the business side. His focus has remained consistent: understand the real problem, test the assumptions, and get something useful working.
During two core-system conversions, Dane moved between SQL development, user-acceptance testing, data reconciliation, and executive working sessions. At times, that meant writing SQL on the fly while projecting an Excel model in the executive office. His ability to move among technical details, financial consequences, and business priorities made him an effective bridge across groups that did not always begin with the same language—or the same definition of “finished.”
For one COO, Dane created an interactive Tableau portfolio-slicer that allowed leadership to examine lending performance across products, asset types, FICO bands, terms, advance rates, and other dimensions. The COO stayed late exploring it, returned the next morning with printed screenshots, and worked beside Dane’s desk while changes were made in real time. He later offered Dane a custom role in an effort to keep him with the company.
At Experian, Dane replaced scattered spreadsheets and flat files with a purpose-built database covering every U.S. bank and credit union. He designed pipelines for more than 500 financial elements, reconstructed balance sheets and income statements, and supported Tableau tools used roughly 1,000 times per month. The resulting system helped sales, product, and market-insights teams compare institutions, identify opportunities, and translate regulatory data into practical conversations.
Dane’s insistence on documentation also proved valuable during audits. By preserving the logic behind each calculation, rigorously checking the underlying data, and reconciling every dollar to the penny, his team passed one engagement so smoothly that the auditors took them to lunch afterward to celebrate the improvement.
Although Dane has managed small teams, he is most at home as an individual contributor: close enough to the data to question it, close enough to the business to understand why it matters, and sufficiently skeptical to ask the inconvenient question before it becomes an expensive problem.
Education
Dane earned three mathematics- and economics-focused degrees from California State University, Long Beach:
- M.S. in Mathematics, with an option in Applied Statistics
- B.S. in Mathematics, with an option in Statistics
- B.A. in Economics, with an option in Mathematical Economics
He completed both bachelor’s degrees in four years and graduated cum laude.
Why Dane Does Data Finance
The philosophy behind Dane Does Data comes from a lesson passed down by the grandfather of Dane’s longtime friend and mentor, Paco:
“There is no honor in doing things that are easy for you, but there is in making that thing easy for others.”
Paco’s grandfather
Dane built the Finance tools for people ready to improve their finances one step at a time. The calculators make the mathematics visible: time can solve financial problems—or make them worse—and the margin between what someone earns and spends determines how quickly progress can compound.
Finance is the Dane Does Data project of which he is proudest. It is both a practical collection of educational tools and the reason he can devote more of his time to building Dane Does Data.
Beyond the data
Dane is a Las Vegas–area personal-finance fanatic, beginner gym-goer, devoted Simpsons fan, and Dodgers supporter who regularly watches the team ruin baseball. He wears a “D” hat to the gym, has three Simpsons tattoos, and is a dad—which is all the internet needs to know about that.
Data, dashboards, dollars, dadhood, dumbbells, and the Dodgers—Dane, distilled.
Educational and mathematical purpose
The site’s calculators apply stated formulas and assumptions to the values entered. Results are educational estimates rather than individualized financial advice, and no projection or investment result is guaranteed.