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Aravind Jagannathan, Vice President, Chief Data Officer, Freddie Mac

Describe your career to date

My career has revolved around large scale transformations in the operations and tech space. Starting at JPM Chase in New York to the World Bank to Freddie Mac, I have been fortunate to have led great teams as we met our business objectives and the company’s mission.  

My proud accomplishments include helping Freddie Mac achieve a common mortgage back security with Fannie Mae as well as setting up a joint venture to support the overall mortgage back market to support and drive our firm’s data modernization journey.  

As CDO, I am focused on building a strong foundation of data governance, quality, and operational execution to enhancing empowering the business. Moving the company from a legacy data ecosystem to our modern platform has been exciting. Overall, I have found being a CDO is a culmination of all the skills and experiences to date. 

How are you developing the data literacy of your organization, including the skills of your data teams and of your business stakeholders? 

Building data literacy within our organization begins with fostering an environment where data’s value is understood. This includes educating employees at all levels on how they are using data to make their everyday decisions. From there it is easy to get buy-in expanding the use of tools and methodologies available for analyzing and interpreting data to make better decisions. Now we are creating a data culture where individuals and teams are encouraged to collaborate, share data insights, and learn from each other’s experiences. We recognize those employees who demonstrate a commitment to using data to solve problems, improve decision-making and drive innovation. Seeing others’ success feeds the data teams’ and stakeholders’ desire to participate in the continuous improvement cycle. 

What role do you play in building and delivering conventional artificial intelligence solutions, including machine learning models? Are you also involved in your organization’s adoption of generative AI? 

We focus on providing the data and capabilities of consumption for the building of our conventional artificial intelligence models. Collaboration is critical so that we can provide the appropriate capabilities to our consumers model while maintaining a level of governance and data management as required by our standards. 

What stage has your organization reached on its data maturity journey? 

We have information risk and governance controls in place across the firm and, along with the data modernization journey, we have set the foundation to be successful across the organization. The SF division is now transitioning to the optimization maturity level and is a founder member of the recently launched an Excellence Program from the EDM Council. 

Aravind Jagannathan
has been included in:
  • 100 Brands 2024 (USA)

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