Keith Toney, Executive Vice President, President – Credit and Decision Management, Discover Financial Services

Describe your career to date

Keith Toney is an Executive Vice President and the President of Credit & Decision Management at Discover Financial Services as well as a member of the Executive Committee. He serves as Co-President for all of Consumer Banking, leading the newly expanded Credit & Decision Management business unit to support enterprise-wide adoption of advanced decision science to drive business outcomes.
Keith joined Discover in 2019 as the Chief Data Officer responsible for the Enterprise Technology organization. He joined the DFS Executive Committee the following year in 2020.
He has over 25 years of technical experience in financial services, analytics, and the economics of risk pooling. Keith specializes in emerging technologies in big data, Artificial Intelligence, machine learning, data visualization capabilities, data governance, and data security.
Prior to joining Discover, Keith served as Senior Vice President of Product, Data Science, and Analytics at The Hartford Financial Services Group. This role held P&L responsibility for the $3.5B in direct-to-consumer Personal Insurance premium and accounted for product management, pricing, underwriting, and loss performance.
Internal
Keith was also previously Chief Data Scientist at Connexion Point, Executive Director at Ernst & Young, and Vice President and General Manager at LexisNexis. In addition to developing software, in the early days, Keith worked as a pricing and reserving actuary in Property & Casualty Insurance along with various product management roles.
Keith has a B.S. and M.S. in mathematics from Ohio State University. 

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

One way we are developing data literacy in the organization is through our Advanced Analytics Resource Center (AARC) at our downtown Chicago office. This two-year program drives value through technology, insights, and decisioning intelligence to improve the customer experience and allows young professionals to gain exposure to multiple business areas, develop technically, and receive ongoing coaching and feedback before specializing. In 2023, DNA accelerated the productivity and impact of AARC hires, delivering more than 200 analytics projects across the company. In addition, 50 percent of our first cohort was placed into full-time jobs after just one year in the program (one year ahead of schedule).

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

Discover has recently worked to fully modernize its analytic data ecosystem, which includes the foundational data layers and the data consumption capabilities as well. With this effort, we have established a data architecture that covers data flows from end-to-end; from all the source systems that produce data through the intermediate stages where data is aggregated or transformed, and then to the each of the consumption points where data is consumed. Throughout these flows, full data lineage is tracked and monitored, thus providing useful metadata from each layer.
These lineage and metadata functions provide continuous and automated data quality monitoring and alerting. These capabilities provide significant improvements to data quality by identifying at a granular level and an early stage issues that arise from data being out of compliance and also data trending away from expected values. Automated alerts and data controls speed the companies correction and mitigation efforts.
In addition to these systemic capabilities, the modernization program has also established an end-to-end data stewardship organization that assigns human ownership of specific data flows at each of the data layers. Supported by the data quality monitoring capabilities, these data stewards make up the cross-functional teams that manage responses to data issues and develop new data capabilities.

Keith Toney
has been included in:
  • 100 Brands 2023 (USA)
  • 100 Brands 2024 (USA)

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