Headline Partner

Luke Pearce, Chief Data Officer, Santander

Describe your career to date

I began my technology career on a graduate training scheme converting from a background in languages to a Software Engineer specialising in Oracle applications. After several roles in manufacturing and pharmaceuticals, I started to become more involved in data design and eventually moved into data warehousing and business intelligence. As infrastructure and storage capacity advanced, this foundation across both technology and data enabled me to develop capabilities where deep analytics and operations work closely together. Within the finance industry – where I have spent the last 20 years – this capability started as enhanced CRM leveraging analytics to give an enhanced customer view. More recently, I led a function looking at generating new income streams based on corporate and industry insights using customer transaction behaviour. I have been fortunate to have worked across many functions and technologies and through periods of significant external change and the evolution of data and its use during that period has enabled many new avenues of exploration and benefit. Within Santander, my focus has been developing an ecosystem that can support generative artificial intelligence (genAI) use cases across governance, platforms, and data science

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

Within Santander we have a data culture workstream that is sponsored by the highest level of the organisation. We are working with local schools and universities to redefine our entry level apprentice cohorts and train them in the tools and technology of the future. The whole of the existing organisation is included in this workstream; from those who just need to understand their responsibilities regarding data, to those in management roles needing to understand the organisation of the future; to those wanting to refocus their careers to a more data led role who can also retrain. This is not optional, and for companies to succeed it is imperative that data remains a core enabler.

What are the key challenges to your data function that you are facing as its leader?

The data landscape has never moved faster and, with the recent advances in AI, the governance frameworks importing risk and ethics must be reinvented to ensure that we can leverage the benefits but in a controlled way. We have seen recent examples where AI has gone wrong, and this is simply not an option in the finance industry; so much of my time at present is devoted to building the right ecosystem to support the capability

Luke Pearce
has been included in:

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

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