Recapping CDAO: Examining the Transformation of Risk Management

Martin Sykora outlines this year's Chief Data & Analytics Officer conference!

Last week’s CDAO presentation on Single-Family Data Governance & Management by Freddie Mac illustrated how traditional back office activities are aligning and impacting front office processes.  We continue our recap of lessons learned at CDAO with this week’s focus on risk management. This April, we were delighted to attend as well as participate in the Financial Services-focused Chief Data & Analytics Officer conference in Boston.  This annual gathering brought together senior-level data practitioners in financial services to share their latest innovations, best practices, challenges and use cases.  The concept of monetizing or commercializing data assets is revolutionizing the Financial Services industry by using governed data strategies partnered with business initiatives to realize data-driven transformation benefits.

Steve Boras, Chief Analytics Officer of Citizens Bank, gave a compelling presentation on transforming the risk management practice from a back-office roadblock to a front office planning instrument.  Traditionally, the function of risk management was to curtail bad practice that might expose the bank.  An honorable and critical function.  But the implementations at many financial services institutions around the world tends to be a reactionary process that may be perceived as bureaucratic and an impediment to process execution.

Transformation to a proactive and leading function is no small feat but, by researching, learning and working with business partners, Steve’s team created simulated outcomes for prescribed market events.  This brings the risk function itself into a planning discussion: questions such as which events should be considered, what mitigation strategies to employ, and how the bank will work together to avoid exposure events need to answered.  Furthermore, this approach could be extended to offer structured products that activate on market events, potentially allowing for a revenue increase through cross-product sales.  In the immortal words of James Brown, “Woah! I feel good!” … feeling good about the front office activation of a traditional back office data function.

Yours truly and Darryn Noble were staffing the NexJ booth demonstrating our latest NexJ CDAi product. We had the pleasure of connecting with several Data & Analytics Financial Services industry representatives and were surprised at the degree of commonality that they expressed in describing their data and analytics challenges. Provisioning data for analytics projects, especially to the level of a feature store, is in an enormous challenge, and this is what NexJ CDAi is designed to address. Our demo highlighted the importance of a centralized attribute store, removing the need for manual or self-selecting data preparation tools. The built-in computed values remove many of the manual errors attributed to coding data transformation for processing as well. And the graph visualization illustrated interactively not only the benefits gained from relationship insights, but from the end user experience as well. Powerful yet flexible. Many thanks to everyone who dropped by the booth and the new connections that we made; for those of you yet to connect, please ping me on LinkedIn or Twitter!We welcome your thoughts, value your insights, and action your feedback: share below!

Chief Data & Analytics Officer, Financial Services Explore and examine the rise of the Chief Data & Analytics Officer and leadership in more depth than ever before. Discuss strategies for building an analytically driven enterprise, defining the role of the Chief Data & Analytics Officer and where they should sit within your business, as well as tactics for demonstrating long term ROI for your business. Attendees were treated to 2 days of premium content tailored to the needs of data analytics executives in financial services. Lively discussion groups, panel sessions and informative keynote presentations explored data analytics applications for risk management, operational excellence, product/service pricing and optimization, marketing, customer analytics and more… See More!

Author: Matthew Bogart

Vice President, Marketing

Matthew is responsible for building awareness for NexJ and demand for its solutions. He regularly engages with analysts, key industry stakeholders, and thought leaders to stay abreast of technology innovation and financial services industry trends and challenges.

Matthew will be sharing his insight and perspective on the enterprise customer management market and the issues affecting the financial services industry today in regular contributions to the NexJ blog. He encourages readers to take part in the conversation or reach out to him directly with their observations on market trends and issues.