Collibra partners with DNB on its digital journey
Aidan Millar, Chief Data & Analytics Officer at DNB, and Steve Neat, VP Sales EMEA at Collibra, speak about harnessing data to deliver transformation.
SN: DNB Bank features regularly in the news for its innovation and how, as a financial institution, it is future proofing itself. Aidan, you personally speak passionately about the need to respond to the digital economy and listen to the voice of the customer. Can you share how your organisation is doing that and what part data plays in it?
AM: Norway is actually a highly digitised society. At DNB alone we have over 90% adoption of our digital mobile bank. DNB has reduced from over 200 branches to just 57 today. The company really understands the need to transform and change the new ways of working in this new digital economy we're in. And when it comes to data, I think there’s also an acknowledgement from the executives at DNB that they understand the need to reconnect with our customers. You may be going digital, but if you're not getting to the data layer, you're not really listening to what the customer is asking for.
SN: What does digital transformation mean to you?
AM: A lot of people talk about going digital. But I kind of reframe this and say going digital is not merely a thing in itself, It's a completely new way of doing things. If you're not going and understanding the data flows in your digital processes, then you're not grasping the key issue, which is to understand how data impacts business value chains.
SN: How do you describe the power and relevance of data to your organisation?
Millar: I think data is central to everything we're doing in DNB. It's a completely new way of doing things, and today, DNB is actually a front runner. We've deployed modern, cloud-based solutions to support advanced analytics for Big Data. And we've adopted Collibra to help us understand the complexity of our data landscape and expose and understand the challenges and opportunities that we have. Collibra’s data governance and data privacy products are helping us accelerate some of the changes that we need to make to become purely digital.
SN: What guiding principles do you use to marry your data program to the bank's wider technology and digital initiatives? Can you give us some insight into how you’ve built your data organisation?
AM: That's a big challenge for most organisations, particularly incumbent banks. My response would be that we started with culture - the way that people think and act towards data. You have to start with the business and make it business-relevant, but it also starts with education. An observation I've made is that there's not enough information in information technology.
SN: Where are you now in your program and what's next for DNB’s data and digital journey?
AM: We're on the third and final leg of a three-year program. It has been a remarkable journey. The first leg was all about positioning and implementing the core data platform, processes and frameworks. The second year was about making it stick and actually getting these operational processes in place and adopting them across the organization. That was actually the hardest part. And the third part is the fun part, which is where most people mistakenly jump to first, and that's about how we're growing the bank. We're now in this third leg of harvesting value using some structured data, and also data quality remediation work that we've done, to really deliver improved customer service and intrinsic value.
Read more about Collibra's work with DNB here.
