This is a profile from the 2022 version of the DataIQ 100.
The latest list is available here.
Paul Hollands, chief data officer, Hastings Insurance
What has been your path to power?
My career to date has had a common theme - I’ve been lucky enough to work with a string of very talented and committed people alongside whom we’ve been able to deliver fantastic things. Transforming how a retail bank uses its data, then using that experience to transform a commercial bank’s approach to using data. From there, I ran the bank’s data transformation programme at NatWest, launching the Natwest Data Academy and delivering a number of category-leading data capabilities.
Hastings Insurance provided me with a very different challenge where I’ve been able to apply my experience in a more agile and fast-paced trading environment, driving a rapid data transformation to a fully cloud-based infrastructure based around Snowflake. As we approach the end of that work, I find myself focusing more on new opportunities – value-adding data sources we can ingest or new use cases that exist for the organisation to help its customers using our data.
What impact has the pandemic had on the role of data in your company/organisation?
Data has always had a vital role in Hastings. It is seen very much as the lifeblood of what we do to ensure that we always have an edge in how we assess and price risk. If anything, we have increased investment in data during the pandemic, accelerating the pace of transformation of our data infrastructure, using these new tools to find broader use cases for our data or applying more advanced techniques to increase the sophistication of our existing use cases.
DataIQ is a trading name of IQ Data Group Limited
10 York Road, London, SE1 7ND
Phone: +44 020 3821 5665
Registered in England: 9900834
Copyright © IQ Data Group Limited 2024