Data-Driven Work Cultures: Synchrony’s Nasim Khoshkhou On How To Effectively Leverage Data To Take Your Company To The Next Level

An Interview With Pierre Brunelle

Empower data experts with learning and upskilling. As the need for data-driven decision-making increases, and the pace of change accelerates, it’s important to empower and develop your people at every level. Ensure that they have access to classes that will keep their base of knowledge current and sharp, as well as help them build new skills and business acumen. Part of the intellectual curiosity that makes a good analyst, also creates interest in their own continual learning.

As part of our series about “How To Effectively Leverage Data To Take Your Company To The Next Level”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Nasim Khoshkhou, SVP, Analytics and Data, Synchrony.

Nasim Khoshkhou is senior vice president, analytics and data, Synchrony. In this role. she is responsible for driving data-driven decision making across the enterprise. She leads the entire analytics function at Synchrony, supporting all credit platforms, clients, customers, and bank-branded products.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series. Before we dive in, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you got started?

I have always had an inclination toward mathematics and the sciences — anything that involved problem solving, understanding “how stuff works,” or how things could be done better. Growing up, I knew I would do something with mathematics, but it wasn’t until I was in my senior year at Wesleyan University while interviewing for jobs when I realized that applications of math and science concepts and methods would be my career path, and the most interesting for me. I was very fortunate to be hired by a Wesleyan alum, one of the co-founders of Argus Information, a data analytics company supporting the consumer banking sector, as a consulting analyst. Since then, I couldn’t imagine doing work that didn’t touch or leverage analytics.

I am now at Synchrony, doing what I love — which is a combination of driving the business forward with information and technical acumen, and a large people element. We partner with every function and sales platform in the organization, as well as Synchrony’s partners, all in service of our end customers and delivering value to the business at the same time. What could be better than bringing the technical/ geeky side and the people/ empathetic side together? I get to use and practice both skill sets every day.

Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lessons or ‘take aways’ you learned from that?

I can think of many when I first started. But I learned from each and every one of them.

I love the concept of continuous learning. I think this is why I enjoy my work at Synchrony. Here, we have adopted an agile mindset — beyond technology development and product development projects. We believe failing fast and learning and growing from mistakes is equally as valuable as success. In analytics, we play a significant role in enabling this for various functions in the organization, evaluating what went well, and what went differently from expectations that we need to learn from. For these reasons, I always think of the quote “Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.” We might spend significant additional time trying to create perfection, but knowing that perfection is not achievable, we should strive to deliver value, learning, and growth.

Is there a particular book, podcast, or film that made a significant impact on you? Can you share a story or explain why it resonated with you so much?

I love to read about human behaviors and interactions, and how to have a more positive and empathetic presence with others. Several years ago, I read Crucial Conversations, Tools for talking when stakes are high, and it really stuck with me. The concept is that crucial conversations are those with high stakes — and therefore high emotions — they could be inside or outside of the professional realm. As a result, many of us apply fight or flight in our daily conversations due to the emotional impact, but when we focus on and identify objectives of each individual from a conversation, and truly engage, we can create stronger dialogue, more successful outcomes, and better decisions. It’s quite logical when you think about it, harder in practice, but something, like yoga or meditation, worth practicing. When I first joined Synchrony, I recommended the book to my entire team.

Are you working on any new, exciting projects now? How do you think that might help people?

The pandemic has accelerated consumers’ adoption of digital behaviors. It has made them crave seamless experiences. Think hyper-personalized recommendations. Or conducting a transaction flawlessly across multiple channels.

At Synchrony, we see this as an opportunity to deliver best in class service. To stand out in this new landscape, a company needs to make each experience simple, frictionless, and personalized.

We seek to engage consumers throughout the purchase journey, from awareness and consideration of a product, all the way through to the purchase. And given the opportunity that lies in front of us, we have built these capabilities and customer experiences to evolve over time, as both merchant and consumer needs are continually evolving.

Our data and designed-centered approach puts the individual at the center of every process or interaction, and away from a functional or channel-driven approach to interacting with the customer. For example, take the concept of when a customer wants to pay their credit card bill. Customers are agnostic to our organizational chart, right? They don’t care what how we operate. What they care about is how quickly can I pay my bill and how seamlessly can that experience happen for me across all the channels.

This year, my team and I are focused on and supporting key strategies to benefit our partners and customers:

• Unleashing our access to data and other data to develop programs that deepen penetration and drive higher share of wallet
• Driving scalability to our reporting and insights, so that our teams can spend more time digging into diagnostics and predictive analytics — the “why?” and “what to do next?” answers.
• Developing human-focused customer experiences through the combination of Agile principles, data-informed solutions and a design-centered approach.
• Driving our integrated products into a broader ecosystem with partners through new distribution channels.

Thank you for all that. Let’s now turn to the main focus of our discussion about empowering organizations to be more “data-driven.” My work centers on the value of data visualization and data collaboration at all levels of an organization, so I’m particularly passionate about this topic. For the benefit of our readers, can you help explain what exactly it means to be data-driven? On a practical level, what does it look like to use data to make decisions?

While data is the raw material, it is only as valuable as the insights and actions taken from it. At Synchrony, we have privileged access to first-party and other data that is fuel for the types of programs that deepen penetration and drive higher share of wallet. Through a combination of data received from our proprietary networks and data shared with us through our strong partnerships, we drive data insights that power program performance and enhance the customer experience.

To support data-driven decision making throughout the organization, information has to be present along every step of the way. Products and experiences have metrics we use not only to set objectives and prioritize, but to assess and learn from. We need to know what’s important to track for a given product, and how to circle back to those insights to “check in” on performance. This means scalably delivering insights on our products and how they are performing. As we gather more data from historical tests, we learn which products resonate with which customers, and how to use modeling to identify appropriate customers for targeting or underwriting. Advanced techniques are implemented to support the predictive and the prescriptive — what we should do next and what action aligns best to what customer.

To make this happen, we start with a foundation of data — we think about our data management practice in strong partnership with technology, privacy, and information security, focusing on quality, governance, sourcing, and the lifecycle of information. Our data management office supports the entire organization — from HR to marketing, from operations to credit and capital management, finance to analytics, and gleans requirements from each of those groups. What information do we need? How do we know if it’s wrong or right? How do we need to make it available for use? From there, we use that foundation of data to build the models, reporting, and decisioning tools the business needs. The more each of our functions is empowered, enabled, and trained to leverage information in their decisions every day, the closer we are to the goal of data-driven decision making throughout the business.

How many of these pieces of data would you be able to accumulate from your working environment and what is the benefit?

Data is the currency that gives companies, like Synchrony, an edge. We drive data insights that power program performance and enhance the customer experience. We invest significantly in a data ecosystem that integrates, analyzes, and builds decision-making matrices.

With more than 60 million customers and 65 million active accounts, we have proprietary first-party data networks and data shared with us through our strong partnerships — a total of more than 7 trillion data points. We have over 200 analysts and data scientists who synthesize, analyze, and make actual recommendations off of all this data. We apply robust data privacy and data protection policies throughout our analytic processes. This allows us to say yes more often to our consumers to access credit and loans and to create a more hyper-personalized customer experience and drive growth.

We’d love to hear about your experiences using data to drive decisions. In your experience, how has data analytics and data collaboration helped improve operations, processes, and customer experiences? We’d love to hear some stories if possible.

Synchrony has invested about $5 billion in our technology platforms. Investments in our data lake, in cloud, and in big data management tools, analytics, and machine learning systems allow us to use data to power actionable insights that drive meaningful outcomes around personalization, customized experiences, better credit decisions, and fraud reduction.

For example, our marketing programs with our partners can track, and ultimately predict, sales growth and profitability trends by product category, region, customer segment and even by coupon redemption.

Our data scientists also leverage our first-party, second-party, and third-party data and advanced machine learning methods to help thwart fraudsters who target credit cards. Because we can track shopping and channel history, and sometimes SKU level details with some of our merchant partners, we can more accurately identify fraudulent purchases. This in turn enables us to approve more legitimate purchases.

Through all this, consumers have a better more positive experience when shopping and banking, and our business partners have profitable growth while meeting their customers’ needs. Every time we can say yes to a customer, we’ve enabled a purchase, and it could be anything from a critical purchase — a new set of tires — or an engagement ring — or holiday shopping. Synchrony is there, helping our customers buy what they need and responsibly finance it, save money at competitive rates, or insure their pet’s health. Any of those decisions we make in the relationship with the customer is powered by data.

Has the shift towards becoming more data-driven been challenging for some teams or organizations from your vantage point? What are the challenges? How can organizations solve these challenges?

We know that at any company, old habits die hard, and humans have a tendency towards anchoring their beliefs — we may hear the statement “we’ve tried that in past.” That’s one of the sentiments we are challenging and pushing through — and a testing and learning culture, gathering insights and knowledge to empower the next decision and improve, is a strong factor in breaking through. For example, something we have tried in the past may have been in a different economic environment or part of a different product. There’s no guarantee it will work today. As consumers digital engagement increased in the pandemic, many have not reverted. We had to seek to understand customer needs, be ready to meet them where they were, and be ready to shift again in this hybrid environment.

One route to success we’ve found is finding champions for data-driven decision making in the business and pairing their voices with ours. To have a General Manager, CMO, or Product Leader share how they leveraged analytics and data to drive better results for their portfolio or partner or take their product to the next level encourages others to ask for the same support. We also have to hire talent who is data fluent both inside and outside the analytics function to be able to connect the dots for various use cases. It’s the present and future of business, and we need to lean into it.

Ok. Thank you. Here is the primary question of our discussion. Based on your experience and success, what are “Five Ways a Company Can Effectively Leverage Data to Take It to The Next Level”? Please share a story or an example for each.

1. Change the way you work. Ask questions as much as possible and gear the questions towards where decisions will be made. Does this align to what our customers are asking for, or their future needs? How will we measure success? Have we succeeded, and if so, what’s next? This constant curiosity but with a focus not just on insights for interest’s sake but to make an impact, drives all the difference. I love it when I hear leaders quoting an insight we learned from a test or a correlation derived from our analysis, to help explain why a decision is being made. And asking those questions helps to get others thinking that way too.
2. Take a customer-centric and human- centric approach. To deliver a more seamless customer experience, we need to evaluate the customer needs and wants from an experience perspective with ease of use. How do we enable their journeys in an intuitive manner? What do they want from our product and our partner’s products, and how do we bring that value to the customer? This comes through a combination of listening to the voice of the customer, analyzing common journeys and identifying bottlenecks and pain points, and turning the those into opportunities. This quarter we have launched our multi-account dashboard for Synchrony credit cards and installments. With the multi-account dashboard, we can reduce log in challenges by simplifying the log in process, increase visibility to statements, activity, payments due, and other relevant information for all accounts, and allow the customer to set up payments, alerts, and access each underlying account in one place.
3. Co-create and partner to get the most from your data. In lending, it has been a common practice to share data about consumers’ credit history and payment behaviors through the credit bureaus for decades. Using that data for underwriting and credit management is nothing new. But we get to be part of this explosion of data and information. We are not only bringing in outside/ third party information from credit bureaus, wallet behaviors, and marketing attributes, but also sharing data in both directions with our merchant and provider partners, gaining more insights about our common customers and respective prospects, serving them better. Through creating these solutions with various partners we’ve identified opportunities to market to the right consumers, increase credit offerings, and manage fraud and collections better.
4. Keep an agile mindset. At Synchrony, we think about agile as a mindset in our day to day, to apply it beyond technology and product development. It’s about incrementally building and learning, accepting failure and being willing to adjust when failure does come, and it’s about flexibility. Our workforce showed tremendous adaptability when we all had to go home over two years ago at the start of the pandemic, and consumers did too. That caused a reshuffle in how we serve our customers every day, a reshuffle of our development priorities and our partners, and it made us stronger and better able to meet the next challenge.
5. Empower data experts with learning and upskilling. As the need for data-driven decision-making increases, and the pace of change accelerates, it’s important to empower and develop your people at every level. Ensure that they have access to classes that will keep their base of knowledge current and sharp, as well as help them build new skills and business acumen. Part of the intellectual curiosity that makes a good analyst, also creates interest in their own continual learning.

The name of this series is “Data-Driven Work Cultures”. Changing a culture is hard. What would you suggest is needed to change a work culture to become more Data Driven?

It may require significant changes, even some organizational, to ensure the seat at the table for the analytics voice. We have dedicated or shared analytics team for each sales platform and/or portfolio group in the business, and we pair them with extensive COEs in data management, data science, customer journeys, internal and external data products, and more, who may be also directly supporting the product and experience organizations, or our functions. Those folks are constantly thinking about how to deliver value with data and information — could this action be improved? We’ve done something the same way for a long time, have we received customer feedback on this? Have we tried different channels of communication or different engagement methods? They champion the testing and learning culture, but they don’t do it alone. We internally champion examples of testing and learning in broader settings. We lean into partnerships within the organization — both in support of those teams but they are also broader voices in our message, celebrating value delivered from analytics.

The future of work has recently become very fluid. Based on your experience, how do you think the needs for data will evolve and change over the next five years?

The pace of data growth is astronomical. Consumers, while benefiting from their data being leveraged by businesses they engage with, are also wary of privacy and security risks. I think we will continue to be challenged by consumers — through the customer voice and also through regulations, to be transparent, in addition to being fair and protecting their information. While this is a challenge for large businesses with data on the move, we are well-positioned to face this challenge. We’ve found our decades of experience dealing with sensitive customer data is valuable to our partners when we can share or combine our data to create joint solutions for consumers. We can navigate those waters appropriately because of our history.

Does your organization have any exciting goals for the near future? What challenges will you need to tackle to reach them? How do you think data analytics can best help you to achieve these goals?

We are celebrating milestones of growth and thinking about the next phase. One example is that we recently surpassed our 500,000th pet insurance subscriber with Pet’s Best, and uniquely at Synchrony, we also provide CareCredit to support financing for health care and pet care costs to pet owners and other consumers. Delivering the value to customers and the experiences they desire in these products is a daily goal, powered by data analytics. Whether that is in how we market and communicate to the consumer, what product we put in front of them, the underwriting decisions, or the management of customer service inquiries, there is data behind every experience.

How can our readers further follow your work?

I welcome readers to follow me on LinkedIn.

Thank you so much for sharing these important insights. We wish you continued success and good health!

About The Interviewer: Pierre Brunelle is co-CEO and Chief Product Officer (CPO) of Noteable, the collaborative notebook platform that enables teams to use and visualize data, together. Prior to Noteable, Brunelle led Amazon’s internal and SageMaker notebook initiatives. Pierre holds an MS in Building Engineering and an MRes in Decision Sciences and Risk Management.