Barclays Africa is on a transformation track, focused on making data analytics available to the whole organisation, as Yasaman Hadjibashi, its chief data officer, explains to Joy Macknight.

Yasaman Hadjibashi

Not quite two years into her current role, Yasaman Hadjibashi, chief data officer (CDO) at Barclays Africa Group, is shaking things up. She is leading a data transformation initiative for the continent, focusing on “intelligent banking” and hyper-personalised customer experiences. “We are using big data and machine-learning capabilities to solve problems for our clients across different business units, from retail through to corporate and investment banking,” she says.

Ms Hadjibashi believes that the bank’s approach to data is fundamentally different from other financial institutions. “When I read about data projects in the financial services industry, especially large banks, they refer to traditional data management in payments, governance, compliance and regulatory reporting,” she says. “Instead, I decided to start with the customer and identify specific areas that will make a difference to them.”

She speaks directly with between 10 and 15 customers every two weeks. “I call them up. Many are surprised that a senior executive, a CDO, would call but I explain that my job is to innovate and drive value for the customer,” she says.

A personalised approach will be vital to the future of banking, believes Ms Hadjibashi, especially when engaging with the millennial generation, which are tech savvy, well informed and willing to switch banks more often than previous generations. “A millennial wants things right now and for the experience to be right every time, so banks need to tailor real-time banking experiences to the person,” she says. “It’s about moving from knowing your customer to understanding and actually predicting all your customers’ needs proactively – in a split second.”

The value of data

Such a powerful vision requires a fundamental mind-set shift in terms of how value is extracted from data analytics, infrastructure and architecture, according to Ms Hadjibashi. Barclays Africa Group has laid the foundations with Hadoop, an open-source commodity data platform that provides low-cost, scalable storage capability for faster analytics than previous enterprise licensed platforms. “It also allows data analytics to be democratised across all departments and in a more sustainable and accessible way for the masses,” she adds.

The bank is also investing in data scientists, who combine computer science with mathematics/statistics studies. “They have a very specific skill set in our bank, coupling a creative mind-set with deep analytical problem solving and supreme technical skills, but also with an understanding of the outside business world,” she says.

But the real magic, according to Ms Hadjibashi, comes from teaming up millennial fast-paced product managers with data scientists to blend in-depth knowledge of the next-generation customer with data technical skills. She says: “All the big tech companies have product managers attached to their apps to identify evolving customer needs, develop new features and functionalities, and then test them – a practice that doesn’t traditionally exist in a bank’s data department. So I brought together big data and product management to redefine next-generation customer experiences.

“Our data product managers are called ‘data wunderkinds’. They combine deep knowledge across big data, customer experience and design with agile execution experience, resulting in deliveries that take weeks rather than the usual months.” 

Smart banking

Since her promotion in February 2015, Ms Hadjibashi and her team have launched an artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled banking chatbot, as well as Pronto, an open-source unstructured social analytics platform built in house. “We are inviting a wider global community of data thinkers and problem solvers to not only help enhance the platform itself but to crack business-related use cases,” she says.

Subsidiary Absa Bank became the first bank in Africa to pilot its chatbot in Facebook Messenger, which stimulates smart free-flow conversations through written text. Using natural language processing and machine-learning techniques, the bank aims to increase account activations among newly onboarded millennial customers for selected product segments. It managed to increase from a traditional 68% activation level to 73% in their pilot population, which “validates the power of new personalised authentic experiences via engaging channels that clearly resonate with millennials”, says Ms Hadjibashi.

The bank is also getting one step ahead of its customer. For example, it uses big data analytics to send personalised predictive SMS alerts to customers who do not have sufficient funds to meet direct debit obligations three days in advance. “Because we know whether a client has a separate savings account or may have prequalified for an overdraft, we can help them avoid unexpected charges on their account, which are a source of annoyance for customers,” says Ms Hadjibashi. She reports that about 67% of customers take action after receiving the tailored SMS messages.

She envisions a future where financial services are seamlessly integrated into consumers’ daily activities. “Through personalised bots, simple authentic experiences and new lean-formed partnerships with other service providers, I envision banks engaging with their customers, addressing their needs and problems in all moments, and in fact predicting most of them with high accuracy,” she says.

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