Niresh Rajah, Group Chief Data Officer, Danske Bank, and DataIQ 100 member has recently joined to lead and build the team to accelerate the data journey of the 200-year-old business and instil a new approach to how data is viewed and utilised across the organisation.
Legacy businesses such as financial organisations typically sit on decades of collected data, but data offices have only had a few years to embed themselves and discern what is possible with the data sets to hand. Rajah and his team have approached this project by developing Data Driven Danske, also known as D-Cubed. Data Driven Danske is a transformational journey taking Danske Bank employees to the next level of leveraging data and analytics to drive value for customers, shareholders, colleagues, and broader stakeholders.
A new strategy for data-driven growth
“Danske is one of the top banks in the Nordics in terms of both personal customers and large institutions, and it is growing rapidly across many different nations,” said Niresh Rajah, group chief data officer, Danske Bank. “Because of this, Danske launched its Forward 28 strategy in 2023, which focuses on digital advisory tools and becoming an eminent financial institution in the wider market. It is a five-year plan that will come to fruition in 2028 and has complete backing by the executive leadership team and board. When this is coupled with Data Driven Danske, the data transformation within the business will be radical.”
On Rajah’s side, delivering a successful Data Driven Danske will require:
- Approval for investment in the latest tools and technologies.
- The development of standardised, curated and reusable data products across the organisation.
- The definition of pragmatic guardrails for data management and analytics, such as the adoption of partnering operating models with business and group functions.
- A level of continuous innovation.
And for the wider Danske team, successful delivery – headed by Rajah and his data function – will require:
- Team members owning their data and adopting suitable management and governance practices.
- Proactive approaches to new use cases and leveraging data products.
- A willingness to learn new skills and capabilities, such as data visualisation, integrating generative artificial intelligence tools, and advocating for a stronger data culture.
- The ability to use data safely, securely, and ethically, which is of pivotal importance for such a highly regulated industry.
Once these are in place and people have embraced their new responsibilities within an evolving data culture, there will be numerous wins for customers (personalised proactive advice, life journey support), shareholders (higher return on equity, growth in focus segments), employees (easy access to data, automation of tasks) and society (improved data privacy, data-enabled ESG, and sustainability).
Storytelling is key
Rajah explained how coming into the business and being tasked with creating a new vision for the data team was a difficult challenge to address, but his prior experiences in multiple financial organisations and consultancies meant he could draw on previous knowledge to solve issues. One of the big challenges was to receive continued backing from executive decision makers and this was achieved through consistent storytelling, regular updates on progress – including evidence of quick wins and relating it to the Forward 28 strategy – and demonstrating how data will achieve the wider business objectives.
“I have worked in financial services sector for a lot of my life, and I think a lot of that is linked to tangible financial benefits and being able to demonstrate what success looks like,” said Rajah. “I think that this is where it is important for us as data professionals to tell the story. We must create a strategy which links between the business benefits – both financial and non-financial in terms of KPIs and measures – and connects all the way back to data products, data platforms, and data foundations.”
One of the ways in which this was achieved was through external support from data experts who assisted an international team of Danske staff on their journey to enhance their data capabilities within the context of Danske’s ambitious objectives. “We want all of our team members to be confident in their abilities when it comes to making faster data-led decisions, and partnering with a third party was a core part of that success,” said Rajah.
The concept of storytelling has been central to Rajah’s route at Danske as not everyone in the business needs to understand the how and why a data solution is working, but they need to understand the results being presented. “We need to start to articulate the financial and non-financial benefits and then create a line of sight,” said Rajah. “This is what it important and that is what I am trying to achieve here at Danske.”
It is well-noted across the DataIQ community that there is often a disconnect between the financial returns on investment seen by data strategies and the initial costs required to set them up. Through improved storytelling, and by highlighting the non-financial benefits – often overlooked – the standing of the data office will grow and trust in data leaders, such as Rajah, will improve across the executive level.
Transition states for a better future: Four key components to become data driven
With the launch of Forward 28 in 2023 and the implementation of Data Driven Danske, it is an exciting time at Danske as the company embraces a new era of data-driven decisions. Data has finally become embedded in the foundations of strategy and executive decisions, and it needs to continue delivering excellence to maintain this position.
“There are a lot of expectations from our board, our regulators and our customers, and this is what we need to focus on,” said Rajah. “We have an ambitious plan and a three-year plan that takes us to the end of 2026 within the five-year plan of Future 28; our transition states. There are four transition states between now and December 2026 that we are articulating to the organisation and the board that we would like to get to regarding our data platform cloud journey.”
Rajah explained that there are four key components that will bring the Data Driven Danske approach to life within the timeline of Forward 28. “The first component is our data foundation,” explained Rajah. “We are aiming to bring our data – our critical data with data quality controls – and our architecture into a comfortable place, both defensively and offensively. By this, I mean defence in terms of regulatory requirements and offence regarding our commercial ambitions.”
“The second is with our cloud data platform,” said Rajah. “We are building a cloud native data platform with a set of tooling which labels artificial intelligence and machine learning. Furthermore, there will be a wide variety of big data which is crucial to our future, and this can be administered via our new platform.”
“Thirdly, our data products themselves are a core component,” said Rajah. “We want to be a data product organisation and create a set of foundational data products and benefit data products or outcome data products that are hosted on a data marketplace within the organisation. Getting these data products right is essential to success.”
“The fourth and final component is around creating data literacy and the data analytics culture within Danske,” explained Rajah. “We are striving to be truly data driven and we want all our colleagues to be data driven in different aspects that are suitable for their roles. To achieve this, we are launching a data academy. We want to create an innovation lab to solve the myriad of problems in using artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques, as well as traditional analytics.”
The Data Driven Danske solution and the Forward 28 programme will set up Danske to be able to truly serve its customers in the best way possible as a data-driven organisation. The help that will be afforded to customers and colleagues alike will improve user experiences, solutions provided and the range of services that are available as well as heightening regulatory compliance and ethical standards. All of this will be achieved within the next three years and, post-2028, it will be interesting to see the data-drive direction Danske looks to take.
