Niresh Rajah, managing director, head of data and digital advisory practice, Grant Thornton

What has been your path to power?

I spent ten years in management consultancy working for Deloitte and Ernst & Young for clients in a variety of industries, including financial services, oil and gas, mining and FMCG. This involved a variety of projects from large, complex transformations to specialist advisory where information was critical for decision-making. This regularly involved preparing and presenting fact-based information to executive committee and boards. I also had the opportunity to work across a number of continents – North America, Africa, Middle East, Asia and, of course, Europe.

I then moved to working for two large universal banks (Lloyds Banking Group and Barclays Bank) for approximately 11 years. I led the single customer view transformation at Lloyds Banking Group, resulting in all data from source systems being ingested into a common data warehouse.    Spending time in the regulation space, where data was critical to meeting regulations, involved me in leading the response to some complex regulations, such as FATCA, Dodd-Frank EMIR, MIFID II , Deposit Guarantee Scheme Directive, GDPR, LIBOR, Structural Reform, etc. 

This then naturally led me to take on responsibility for establishing and managing the chief data office (CDO) as BCBS 239 and regulators became specifically focused on effective management of data for prudential and systematic risk management in the financial services industry. Taking accountability for developing the data strategy and key standards, including data management, data quality and data lineage.

While at Barclays UK, I had responsibility for managing the chief data office, accountability for managing regulatory change, regulatory developments including regtech and automation of controls across the estate. Working with the business, the focus was on how to leverage data to solve real problems - reducing customer complaints and improving service, increasing up-sell/cross-sell opportunities through insightful data.

In the last 18 months, I joined Grant Thornton to establish and lead the data and digital advisory practice. This has involved working on extremely interesting projects, from developing an ESG data and analytics platform, providing data analytics solutions, helping organisations with their data management issues, supporting democratisation of data within an organisation, developing data platforms, and working with some fantastic innovative technologies as collaboration partners.