Matt Cresswell, chief data officer, Moneysupermarket Group
Describe your career to date
My career began in data engineering, using Microsoft technologies to build solutions to help the largest grocery retailers in the world (WalMart, Kroger, Tesco etc) leverage their data to improve customer experience through better in-store product availability, pricing and personalised food discovery recommenders.
In total, I’ve amassed over 20 years’ experience and worked at some fantastic businesses (Dunnhumby, Amazon and Just-Eat) who have pioneers leveraging data to create value for their customers and partners. During this time, my career grew towards data leadership and helping businesses transform their data into assets. Recently this has involved implementing modern low latency (seconds) data architectures and creating connected ecosystems (across web, app, marketing and data environments) designed to get the most from data, creating better retail customer experiences.
I have been in my current role since November 2020, leading a group-wide data strategy to bring all the group’s data into single data platform in Google Cloud Platform. This has involved leveraging Tableau to standardise insight across all brands, launch machine learning products predicting customer behaviour and model pricing scenarios, and fuelling data-driven customer communications through Braze (multi-channel customer engagement platform).
What stage has your organisation reached on its data maturity journey?
In 2022 we launched a group-wide single source of truth and for the first time all Moneysupermarket’s brands share common metrics and insights, providing forensic-level detail into every customer interaction. We use this data to power efficient customer acquisition and successfully retain and grow our existing customers too.
Moneysupermarket Group data is a first-class citizen with a central function, executive representation and leading strategy delivering a data portfolio of products designed to make data more discoverability and usable day to day across the group. To do this successfully, we’ve brought all our data talent together into a single team, including data and analytics engineering, data science, analysis, CRM engineers, product owners and delivery roles co-located across the UK, but working together to achieve the same goals.
What challenges do you see for data in the year ahead that will have an impact on your organisation and on the industry as a whole?
There’s an ever-growing hunger for more data at Moneysupermarket Group and, as a team, we try to embrace a “build once and reuse” and create features that deliver value to all brands. Balancing business demand and linking data roadmaps to business goals will be key to success next year. Additionally, data lives by a “privacy first” principle, we strive to raise the bar on all things data governance and security, and lead change through the group to ensure we own data responsibly. Longer term advancements in technology and government policy will really help consumers champion and (possibly) own their personal data, shifting PII data sovereignty away from enterprises - but probably not this year.
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