How is your organisation using data and analytics to support the corporate vision and purpose?
The Global Open Finance Centre of Excellence vision is safely to unlock the value, values and potential of customer data to improve lives through data and analytics. Our purpose is delivered through data, analytics, enabling tech and capable colleagues, all driving value for citizens, organisations and governments for societal and economic benefit.
Our data science team, academic colleagues and partners align around our shared purpose, culture and ways of working that:
- Defines why (our purpose) and is challenge-led;
- Asks what – the data we need to overcome the big challenges;
- Collaborates – harnessing the power of the collective to crack a problem with a use case.
Our collective team consists of the brightest and most creative minds to bring purposeful, data-driven innovation from beginning to end.
2020 was a year like no other – how did it impact on your planned activities and what unplanned ones did you have to introduce?
We put most of our plans for 2020 to one side. Instead, GOFCoE had an important data analytical role to play in responding to the crisis created by Covid-19. We had the safe haven data environment, the talent and the tools to make an impact from a project aimed at providing government bodies with data-driven insights on the impact of Covid-19.
What we needed was the support of small and large organisations to join us to help
them understand the financial impact in the UK and shape any policies or interventions by those government bodies in response, then to provide insights into the impact of any policies or interventions.
We launched a “Covid-19-Citizen” and “Covid-19-SME” insights project, the aim of which was to unlock the power of financial data in order to provide the UK government with insights into the impacts of the pandemic on the nation’s economy. With our data partners we created:
- Data governance contracts for data supply;
- Public sector information-sharing agreements (eg, with Business, Enterprise and Industrial Strategy, HM Treasury, Bank of England, Financial Conduct Authority);
- Protection for individuals’ data in accordance with GDPR and their own position as a neutral third-party.
With full transparency, our data science team built a set of dashboards. First of all, they
employed synthetic data to show stakeholders how their data would be used to create economic insights and how the privacy and commercial sensitivity of the data would be thoroughly protected. We then took on-board live data from our first providers.
GOFCoE is now delivering a regular stream of insights to the UK government around
citizens’ and small business’s financial well-being.