Zachery Anderson, chief data and analytics officer, NatWest
Describe your career to date
I studied game theory and formal methods in university and have had several analytical roles over the years, including analyst, economist, statistician and quant. I then became a team leader before data scientist became a role description. I have always been interested in how data and mathematics can help explain and predict human behaviour.
My first leadership job was at Nissan, where I created N-Quant, a multidisciplinary team using quantitative methods to solve special problems across the company. One of the most fun projects was using value at risk models to optimally design automotive plant capacity. After that, I stayed in automotive but, moved to JD Power & Associates (JDPA), where I led solutions delivery and product management for the company’s analytics and data division.
From JDPA, I went to Electronic Arts, where I spent more than decade, leading various analytics, engineering, UX research, and game development teams. Ultimately, I founded and built the global analytics and insights function and worked with a small group of people to develop the customer data system which helped fuel EA’s turnaround.
I joined NatWest Group as chief data and analytics officer in February 2020 and lead the bank’s data strategy, data science, and data engineering teams, more recently leading the customer personalisation and engagement strategy for the bank.
What stage has your organisation reached on its data maturity journey?
NatWest is a large organisation with many business units, as a result the data maturity is varied. On the defensive side, its data governance and controls have a long history in the firm and are well established. On the offensive side, there is more heterogeneity. Overall, the business is working to achieve scale but some parts are just beginning to leverage insights and others are already heavily data driven, such as the retail bank, with more than 50% of new sales affected by analytics.
Tell us about the data and analytics resources you are responsible for
The NatWest data and analytics organisation reports into the group CIO and has dotted lines into the franchises and functions. We have over 2,000 permanent and contracted staff based in the UK, India, and Poland. We have grown our data engineering and data science teams significantly in the past two years, hiring more than 500 new staff last year alone. We are continuing to grow at a rapid pace this year.
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