Customer Story
DNB
2.1 Million
retail customers
225,000+
corporate customers
26
branches across Norway
Overview
DNB is Norway’s leading financial services provider with over 2.1M retail customers and 225,000 corporate customers. In Norway, DNB operates as a full-service bank from retail to investments and outside of Norway, it operates 26 branches with varying degrees of services and products.
Business challenge
To stay competitive and relevant, DNB recognized the criticality of shifting from a traditional mode of operation to a digital mode based on its customer’s preferences. As Aidan Millar, Chief Data Officer, reflected, “Our customers are talking to us every second of the day on digital channels, and we have to have the ability to listen and respond effectively to their needs.” By making more effective use of data, DNB believes that customer insights can be derived that will significantly enhance customer interactions.
Late in 2017, DNB initiated its “4theFuture” strategy. Central to this initiative, DNB laid out a three-year data journey focused on these core steps:
- Protect the Bank
- Institutionalize
- Grow the Bank
It’s an approach that recognized that DNB needed to put foundational data governance practices in place – effectively “learning to walk” before the organization could “run.” To do this effectively, DNB initiated four tracks as part of the Chief Data Office Change Program. First, it started with people: putting the right people in the right place to enable success. Second, it introduced processes that would promote data ownership through DNB. Third, it incorporated technology to provide context and “make the invisible visible.” And last, it established a focus on delivering value to the business through quick wins.
Four key objectives are at the core of DNB’s 4theFuture strategy:
- Increase innovative power
- Increase the use of customer insight
- Drive skills enhancement
- Incorporate corporate responsibility in all processes
Underlying these objectives is a comprehensive focus on addressing regulatory requirements. As Millar notes, “Regulations are often seen as a burden and should be reframed as best practice, but why wouldn’t you want to be compliant with best practice?”
One of DNB’s key challenges was to establish an ongoing data-driven view of customer data quality to drive better customer engagement while meeting aggressive timelines to address regulatory compliance requirements (BCBS239, GDPR, and AML). To address this challenge, DNB moved forward with a strategy for a customer data platform incorporating critical components for data quality and data governance.
Industry
Financial Services
Challenge
Establish an ongoing view into customer data quality to address regulatory compliance requirements and enhance customer engagement.
Solution
- Trillium Discovery
- Trillium Quality
- Data Governance with Collibra Data Governance Center
- Trillium Discovery’s automated bi-directional integration with Collibra DGC
“We’ve got to be seen as the trusted data custodian that capitalizes on data driven insights to deliver value for our customers, and we’ve got to do this in an ethical and compliant way.”
Aidan Millar Chief Data Officer
Solution and implementation
Addressing customer data challenges is part of the organization’s broader data governance initiative. Out of five predominate use cases, DNB focused on two (AML and BCBS 239) as pilots for the broader effort. As DNB started to identify gaps, the teams found challenges with their processes. By bringing a focus around data governance and data quality together, DNB established a real cultural change that it sought to broaden and operationalize. This effort included bringing resources as close as possible to the business problems and establishing a mechanism in the form of Governance Forums (including data boards and communities) to engage people, drive priorities, and remove blocking points. With those pieces in place, DNB could work on situational assessments to resolve problems and create scalable and reusable data assets.
In the pilots for AML and BCBS 239, DNB setup a technical framework that included:
- Collibra Data Governance Center to support the identification and definition of data flows and trace data lineage, as well as critical business rules
- Trillium Discovery to profile, analyze and provide measurement of data quality concerns, as well as parsing and matching of critical customer data
- Trillium Discovery’s integration to bring data quality metrics back into Collibra
The next steps after the pilot include spin offs from the AML work to provide similar work for all branches and Head Office for additional AML quality measurements to scan critical AML data elements against pre-defined data quality rules and improved disciplines for remediation and tracking. Along with the AML work, there are several other initiatives with data quality issues driven by Data Stewards across the organization. DNB has started identifying critical data elements on their customer data and monitor these with Trillium Discovery. This will provide a good benchmark and measure development as they try to remediate data quality issues in their customer data value chains. Payments is another critical area in DNB as it is a critical infrastructure provider of Norwegian payment services. By using Trillium Discovery, DNB can now systematically assess and monitor their data quality in critical payment value chains.
Utilizing Trillium Discovery, DNB is able to validate various data elements in its data warehouse versus operational input. With over 400 business rules now running against these outcomes, the governance teams can regularly deliver updates into Collibra for broad understanding while ensuring strict security policies are complied with.
By pulling together the views for both data governance and data quality, DNB could ensure that management and governance teams had immediate knowledge and insight into issues and improvements in data quality. This validated the approach from the pilot and DNB then incorporated Trillium Quality into its production data quality operations.
Benefits
Regulatory reporting was the initial focus, and the pilot phase was able to provide proof that data wasn’t “missing” but instead pinpointed a number of quality issues needing improvements. The governance teams were able to report to regulators on the findings with proof rather than previous hearsay.
DNB’s ability to schedule business rules and readily access and leverage the outcomes from Trillium Discovery through Collibra DGC has enabled it to establish a continuous data quality monitoring process for its governance teams and broader organization. Overall Trillium Discovery and Trillium Quality help DNB ensure quality data for all its customers and advance its “4theFuture” strategy.
Precisely Trillium Discovery
Visually assess the quality of your data and support data governance with comprehensive profiling that’s customized to your unique business needs