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Al Mathie, Chief Data Officer, NFU Mutual

Al Mathie, Chief Data Officer, NFU Mutual

Describe your career to date

I have spent the vast majority of my career in insurance, always around technology and data, and with a focus on strategy and transformation delivery.

A large part of my career was with Aviva, where I became really interested in how data can drive a business forward. It was during this time that I developed a real passion for claims and how data can be used to improve the claims experience for customers and managed cost.

Following my time at Aviva, I made a conscious decision to go consulting and joined Baringa where I spent four years working with insurers on their data strategies and data transformation programmes. It was working at Baringa, leading a piece of work to develop the data strategy for NFU Mutual, that led me to my current role; joining as the first Chief Data Officer and getting to deliver the vision I helped set out was just too good an opportunity to walk past.

I am now just over two years into my Chief Data Officer tenure and, as I reflect back on my time so far, there are three key takeaways I thought worth sharing:

My role is one of a business leader, not a technology leader. I need to know technology, but understanding what we do as a business is critical; it allows us to focus the conversation on value outcomes not the inputs.
Build a great team of passionate people around you. Technology continues to change, so go for a growth mindset and desire to learn.
Be restless, relentless, and kind. Accept that change is a constant, so the journey will never be done. Focus on driving value outcomes quickly and often, and most importantly be brave and face into the tough decisions early.

Data literacy is a key enabler of the value and impact from data. How are you approaching this within your organisation?

Data Literacy is critical to data transformation. Last year, I added a dedicated Data Literacy lead role into my team with the specific aim of looking at the skills and capabilities we need both within the data community and the wider user community. For me, data literacy is not just about building the skills in the data community, it is for everybody in the organisation to understand the role data plays in their job and how they need to work with data to ensure it is fit for purpose. From the front-line teams speaking with our customers, through to our executive teams making decision informed by data, everybody needs the right level of data literacy. We have started by working with our Learning and Development teams to develop a data career framework and a number of key data personas we believe are both critical and representative for what we need. We are now working on building out some of the materials needed to support this journey. It is early days, but a critical component of our journey.

Have you set out a vision for data? If so, what is it aiming for and does it embrace the whole organisation or just the data function?

Our data vision seeks to embrace the whole organisation, not just the data functions. We have already agreed a multi-year strategy with the Board and secured funding to execute against this. We are now a couple of years into this journey, and it continues to evolve and grow.

Data is the lifeblood of our organisation and good data is critical to everything we do; from providing the market leading customer experience, building the analytical models that inform our pricing, through to demonstrating to the regulator we are doing things in a fair and transparent way; data permeates through all aspects of our business.

Our strategy and vision are based around business domains and ready-made, easy to use, trusted data products that address the most asked questions by our business.

This includes building our strategic data platform, embedding effective data management practice and discipline, delivering good enough data quality, and providing the community the skills and capabilities to use data to solve business problems efficiently. This means a combination of heavying lifting technology change and rapid proof of concept innovation for things like generative AI and machine learning to solve business problems.

This means we need to be flexible and adaptable. The macro and micro environment we operate within is changing and we need to be responsive to this, while also building foundational capability that will set the business up for the next ten years and more.

As data products will be there to meet the needs of the data community and the wider business, this means the wider community must be involved. Collaboration is key, incremental delivery is critical; curiosity and a willingness to try new stuff is what will make the difference.

Al Mathie
has been included in:

100 Brands 2023 (EMEA)
100 Brands 2024 (EMEA)

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Al Mathie, Chief Data Officer, NFU Mutual

Join our membership network of over 250 global senior data and AI leaders.

The trusted global collaboration and intelligence platform for data leaders.

Join our membership network of over 250
global senior data and AI leaders.