• Home
  • >
  • Chris Miller, Chief Data Officer, Royal London Group

Chris Miller, Chief Data Officer, Royal London Group

Describe your career to date  

It is a privilege to be the first CDO for Royal London; every week provides variety, growth, and challenge. Having moved into this role in 2021, I spent last year establishing a new data organisation within the group, focusing on building capability and earning a mandate to deliver change. 

 

As I transitioned into the role, I was able to draw on relationships and perspectives from my previous duties at Royal London, including as group chief audit officer, a position I held for five years. 

 

The audit role gave me a holistic view of, and deep insight into, our business. It involved working closely with the board and executive teams, having a view on all strategic and commercial matters, sharpening my influencing and diplomacy skills, while building trusted relationships with colleagues and external stakeholders, such as regulators. These lateral perspectives have been massively helpful going through a leadership transition into the CDO role. 

 

Prior to joining Royal London, I worked in professional services at Deloitte. I joined there as a computing science graduate, before qualifying as a chartered accountant, and working on technology risk and audit client engagements for close to ten years. The variety of clients, international experience and different projects was a steep but enriching learning curve. 

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

As a modern mutual, we run the organisation in the interests of our customers and members, who ultimately benefit from the power of our mutuality. Our business strategy reflects the importance of data in helping customers achieve good outcomes in this context, through a data-led, digitally nimble approach. With the effective data culture set, we’re now working through a multi-year roadmap to enhance how we use data across our business. 

 

Tell us about the data and analytics resources you are responsible for

Our data organisation is a part of our group commercial division. Being positioned here has brought strong business alignment and ownership of the data-agenda. It also helps us to coordinate business demands around data before they reach our technology teams, who we collaborate closely with day to day. 

 

Our data office has a broad remit and works across most areas of the data eco-system and we are custodians of the group’s data strategy. Our team provides data science, data visualisation and data engineering skillsets to build insight and machine learning products. Our data transformation teams are embedded into portfolio projects, providing data architecture, data design and data modelling services. 

 

We also act as the hub for data management, data privacy and data integrity capabilities. In total, there are around 50 colleagues directly in our data office, with the addition of several multi-disciplinary squads working indirectly as part of the team. 

What challenges do you see for data in the year ahead that will have an impact on your organisation and on the industry as a whole?  

We are looking forward to the major regulatory developments progressing in 2023 that will benefit customers. 

 

The Financial Conduct Authority’s new Consumer Duty seeks to enhance protection of retail customers and strengthens the obligations on providers to demonstrate that customers receive good outcomes. While this is not changing anything fundamental in our business or data strategy ambitions, it does emphasise the importance of data in ensuring providers are measuring and tracking customer journeys and taking action to help customers avoid foreseeable harm. 

 

Another regulatory project we are working on is the Pensions Dashboard Programme, an initiative to allow pension savers in the UK to see their retirement savings in one place. We welcome both of these initiatives as they require an increasingly consolidated view of customer data and emphasise the value of data in achieving good customer outcomes. 

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 strategy sets out the vision for data across the entire enterprise. We worked closely with colleagues to ensure it aligns tightly with the business strategy, and with corresponding visions around technology and customer experience. In summary, our data strategy is our vision for data democratisation, enabling colleagues to deliver great customer experience, helping customers make good financial decisions and achieving good outcomes, and providing data that is turned into insight and valuable solutions. 

 

Have you been able to fix the data foundations of your organisation, particularly with regard to data quality?   

Laying strong foundations around technology, people and process is our focus at this stage on our data journey. We are making rapid progress here, working with our technology colleagues and external partners in key areas such as data platforms, data models, catalogue and data quality profiling. However, the foundations will always need to evolve as we continue to enhance them as the internal and external environment evolves and changes.

Chris Miller
has been included in:
  • 100 Brands 2023 (EMEA)

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