Digital banking
information, or 20 million filing cabinets if you prefer your analogies in physical form. Nor does UniCredit seem immune to this proliferation either. As I spoke to Dasgupta, this Italian giant was in the midst of a major digital and data investment, with a snowstorm of practical reforms to come. “I think, all in all, that the significance of data, as well as the usability of data, has improved and increased over the past few years,” is how the executive puts it. “And banks are natural users of that data.” As that last comment implies, however, neither Dasgupta nor his employer can merely expect the data to do the work for them. On the contrary, truly leveraging so much information means ensuring UniCredit understands the mountain of digital paperwork around them – then putting in place systems that allow staff to exploit it. It means, moreover, appreciating where data can be slotted into the bank’s existing platforms, and where that same knowledge can be used across varied departments. And for Dasgupta himself, it means liaising closely with colleagues, right across the c-suite, to ensure the bank’s data is used used both ethically and safely. It goes without saying, of course, that none of this is easy. But get it right and it could transform how Dasgupta goes about his business – and UniCredit goes about its own.
See you data
One way of thinking about banks and their data might be to invoke the chicken and egg conundrum. What, to put it differently, came first: all that information, or the tools and systems to understand it? For Dasgupta, the answer is probably somewhere in the middle. It goes without saying, he notes, that technologies like the cloud – and the scalability of data contained there – is increasing dramatically. According to one recent survey, banks run an average of 38% of their business applications through the cloud. UniCredit, for its part, has pushed ahead with a panoply of similar moves, with a focus on APIs just one of the reasons it was named Western Europe’s best bank for innovation in digital banking by The Banker magazine. All the same, it’d be wrong to imply that the chicken of new technology can be understood without the egg of novel use cases. “You can use that data footprint to simplify processes more,” argues Dasgupta, noting that innovations such as data mining allow a far more subtle appreciation of sustainability than would ever have been possible in the pre-digital age. Once you add groundbreaking technologies like AI to the mix – which as Dasgupta explains allows bank officials to “verify” if a certain data set is accurate – you can quickly see how data, technology, and new ways to use both, can gallop ahead together. Certainly, Dasgupta sees a holistic approach as central to his own job. The
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group chief data and intelligence officer at UniCredit since January 2023, he describes his tenure so far as giving definition to an “end-to-end data transformation” across the bank. In practice, he continues, that not only involves customer segmentation and personalisation, but also behind-the-scenes processes like KYC. “How,” Dasgupta asks, “can I create a repository so that this data in an anonymised form can also be used for other purposes, within the financial or risk processes of the entire chain?”
End-to-end transformations To begin answering that question, you first get the impression that Dasgupta has simply examined where existing technologies can be exploited across multiple departments. That’s true, to give one example, in terms of natural language processing. Essentially giving computers the ability to understand and interpret human language, Dasgupta notes that the technology is equally useful for codifying documents in-house – and for verifying customer signatures when they come to sign a cheque. Elsewhere, UniCredit is doing comparable work with all that data it collects. Now, when the bank spots B2B customers focusing on payment transactions across borders, analytics help offer them relevant services.
“We have to take decisions where every team, every area, needs to come together and work together towards a solution.”
There are plenty of options here: just in May, UniCredit announced a new partnership with Mastercard to offer multiple payment rails, among other innovations. Just as importantly, however, UniCredit uses those same business-boosting data sets to also keep an eye on customer safety, ensuring they’re not duped by money launderers. You can spot similar innovations elsewhere too. Exploiting data and analytics, dovetailed with a thorough credit policy review policy, the bank has cut the time it takes to confirm a credit evaluation down to about 60 minutes, a number that falls even more sharply in physical branches.
It probably helps that clients now have to produce far less income documentation than before, thanks largely to income models that can calculate affordability based on existing UniCredit data. Yet if this kind of joined-up thinking speaks vividly to the “end-to-end data transformation” Dasgupta is so obviously excited for, all this information obviously needs to be easy to retrieve. Put it like this: no matter how “holistic” UniCredit may wish to be, the bank won’t get far if the fraud management team
One Innovecs 23 exabyte The amount of
data US banks have stored – equivalent to 275 billion MP3s.
Dr Shivaji Dasgupta, UniCredit’s group chief data and intelligence officer.
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