Navigating the Data Divide: A Day in the Life of a Financial Leader
Follow the true-to-life travails of a COO at a top FinServ company as she learns how to overcome data challenges and thrive in turbulence.
Say hi to Aisha (not a real person, but her struggle is)
Aisha Washington is a strategic, innovative, results-driven business leader at a top financial services company, and a self-described “professionally trained helicopter parent” of two.
As a chief operating officer with over two decades of experience in the industry, Aisha is hard to take by surprise. And the recent failure of two major banks is a prime example of why Aisha is known for saying, “Risk and uncertainty aren’t something you can overcome. They’re something you leverage against your competition.”
It’s this no-nonsense, pragmatic attitude that enabled Aisha’s bank, Sappho Financial, to consistently exceed industry benchmarks using a customer-centric approach while remaining “bullish” on emerging technologies.
Aisha knows data is the key to driving business value. But that doesn’t mean Sappho Financial isn’t facing uphill battles.
Siloed data, a lack of a 360-degree customer view, and reliance on stale or incomplete data for decision-making are just some of the hurdles Sappho Financial has yet to overcome.
Morning: Waking up to inefficiencies disguised as opportunities
Aisha reviews the latest performance reports and recalls a recent executive meeting. All the department heads were there — chief data officer, chief marketing officer, chief information officer, chief risk officer — and each one came ready with legitimate concerns.
It didn’t take long to establish a recurring theme: the quality and accessibility of data across the organization was inadequate.
The chief data officer, Logan Frank, put it this way: “The fragmented data landscape we’re facing is easily the biggest inhibitor of our growth and efficiency. You all know that evolutionary principles apply to businesses, right? Well, we’re hurtling toward the ‘punctuated equilibrium’ phase of our evolution. Either we modernize and rapidly adapt to environmental pressures, or Sappho Financial will go und — ”
Aisha jumped in, “We get it.”
Once the meeting adjourned, Aisha felt an incredible amount of pressure. “I haven’t felt this on edge since 2008,” she thought.
If nothing else, the gauntlet is set. Aisha needs to overcome these challenges and empower her teams with the insights they need to drive better business outcomes.
Here’s how Aisha could relieve the C-level tension at Sappho Financial
By implementing Slalom’s Modern Culture of Data (MCoD) framework and Snowflake’s data platform, Sappho Financial can:
- Centralize and manage its data
- Gain a 360-degree customer view
- Drive enterprise data governance
- Identify inefficacies and areas of growth that would otherwise have gone unnoticed
- Enhance decision-making capabilities
- Achieve increased ROI for a more successful future
Afternoon: Piecing together a patchwork customer view
Aisha often meets with the marketing team over lunch, but today is one of those “all-hands-on-deck” kinds of days, so her marketing team is briefing her on Sappho Financial’s upcoming campaigns.
Aisha doesn’t like to repeat herself, but she always opens these meetings with the same vital question: “How will our campaigns promote customer satisfaction and retention?” Her marketing team isn’t short on substantive responses and communicates them effectively.
The team’s honesty and transparency also help. The director of marketing, Natalia Fiorenzi, never shies away from highlighting internal weaknesses.
“Although our campaigns have been successful so far,” Natalia says, “we’re still struggling to piece together a complete picture of our customers. The biggest deficiency is our lack of predictive power. We don’t know what their spending habits look like, say, a month down the road, or a year, or even next week, to be honest.”
“Is that so?” Aisha says. “You said you were ‘drowning in data’ the last time we spoke.”
“Oh, I’m absolutely swimming in the stuff,” Natalia says. “It’s just that the insights we get from it aren’t deep enough to make meaningful predictions around customer behavior.”
Natalia speaks the truth. And on top of excessive data growth, Sappho Financial’s marketing team consistently runs into issues with duplicate records, missing information, and outdated data on customer preferences and behaviors.
If Aisha had partnered with us, she could’ve given Natalia the good news:
“By integrating Slalom’s expertise and Snowflake’s technology, Sappho Financial can now combine data from various sources to help our teams better understand customer needs, preferences, and behavior. This will improve customer experiences, personalized marketing campaigns, and targeted product offerings. That means launching more effective campaigns with data-driven decisions leading the way.”
Evening: Winding down and reducing risk
You don’t have to tell Aisha that it’s the chief risk officer Lorrie Michaels’ job to look after Sappho Financial’s risk management practices, regulatory compliance, and cybersecurity issues.
Even so, Aisha’s spending her evening worrying about how even the smallest oversight or miscalculation could have catastrophic consequences for Sappho Financial and its customers.
Why is she losing sleep over this? For two reasons:
- Earlier in the day, Aisha read about the settlement of a cyberattack on a Canadian bank that resulted in a loss of data and funds, and depreciated the most valuable commodity in every industry: customer trust.
- Aisha recently attended the Global Financial Innovation and Security Summit where an International Monetary Fund survey — as discussed in “Mounting Cyber Threats Mean Financial Firms Urgently Need Better Safeguards” — was cited as a reason to prioritize investments in advanced cybersecurity measures to protect sensitive customer data.
As Aisha turns on her white noise machine, her thoughts touch on all the major themes of the day: the fragmented data landscape discussion at the executive meeting, the talk with the marketing team about data-quality issues, and now her concern about risk management. All the lines of thought converge on the need for a robust and modern data solution.
Aisha falls asleep and has a lucid dream of a serene data landscape with a soothing voiceover:
“Sappho Financial can implement a comprehensive risk management strategy with Slalom and Snowflake that incorporates real-time monitoring, early detection of threats, and timely response protocols. By using the power of data to protect sensitive information, Sappho Financial can bolster its reputation for being a trusted and secure institution for its customers.”
The “after” picture: Sappho Financial turns to Slalom and Snowflake
Just months after partnering with Slalom and adopting Snowflake, Aisha has seen significant improvements across Sappho Financial’s operations. Data-driven decision-making is now the norm, and Sappho Financial has turned the turbulence in the financial services industry into a competitive advantage.
Here’s what Sappho Financial looks like today:
- Data-driven strategies. By using Snowflake’s data platform, Aisha has been able to focus on extracting value from key industry trends: data-driven investment strategies, risk management, regulatory compliance, and personalized customer services. Her teams can delve deeper into these areas and keep Sappho Financial ahead of the curve.
- Unlocking key differentiators. Aisha now harnesses the power of Snowflake’s platform, which makes high-quality market datasets available through Snowflake Marketplace. These enrich Sappho Financial’s first-party data for more complete customer profiles. Secure data collaboration through direct shares and clean rooms improves internal and external data sharing.
- Safe and secure. Aisha chose Snowflake as the data platform for its industry-leading security features and regulatory accreditations, ensuring the highest levels of security for Sappho Financial’s accounts and users. With Snowpark, Sappho Financial can now develop purpose-built machine learning models natively on Snowflake’s elastic performance engine to further strengthen its data and security stature.
Don’t wait to use data to drive business outcomes
It’s your turn to unlock the true value of your data. Read our latest whitepaper and learn more about how Slalom and Snowflake can help you achieve your business goals in the financial services industry and thrive in turbulence.
Slalom is a global consulting firm that helps people and organizations dream bigger, move faster, and build better tomorrows for all. Learn more and reach out today.
