Digital banking
Right: Dasgupta focuses on the importance of collaboration as UniCredit continues its data-driven journey.
Opening page: The UniCredit Tower, Milan, the headquarters of UniCredit Bank.
can’t actually access the same information as the sales staff down the hall. To that end, Dasgupta has battled to make “data accessible” right across the system, with 44% of all the institution’s information now available across teams. Crucial to this work is the so-called ‘federated data architecture’ – which as Dasgupta suggests is far more than a server full of numbers. “We realised,” he says, “that the utopian idea of bringing all the data into one pot together, as a single source, will not work, because then you have the onus on the single platform to clean and cleanse and keep the quality.”
“We realised that the utopian idea of bringing all the data into one pot together, as a single source, will not work, because then you have the onus on the single platform to clean and cleanse and keep the quality.”
60
minutes How quickly, thanks in large part to data and analytics, UniCredit has cut the time it takes to confirm many credit evaluations, a figure that drops even further for in-branch customers.
UniCredit 24
As an alternative, UniCredit has opted to cleanse data sets at source, then using APIs to make them accessible, which means Dasgupta and his colleagues haven’t had to rely on complicated (and fallible) pipelines to pass information about. It’s a lack of centralisation apparent elsewhere in UniCredit’s data setup too. Far from ruling over his employer’s servers and folders like some feudal lord, Dasgupta instead emphasises the importance of collaboration, as the Italian giant continues continues its data-driven journey. He says: “We have to take decisions where every team, every area, needs to come together and work together towards a solution.” To explain this, Dasgupta highlights his own role. From the infrastructure team to business technology experts, he says bringing any project to its conclusion would be impossible without teamwork.
People power
A similar spirit of partnership can be sensed when it comes to cybersecurity at UniCredit. Certainly, Dasgupta can’t afford to be sloppy. In 2019, the bank revealed a data breach involving three million customers, encompassing everything from personal phone numbers to the cities clients were based in. Considering that was the third such breach UniCredit had faced in recent years, and that 78% of the EU’s biggest 240 banks suffered similar embarrassment as late as 2022, it makes sense that Dasgupta would accept all the help he can get. With that in mind, he stresses that UniCredit’s chief data protection officer, together with relevant security officers, are at the centre of every decision he makes – both to ensure that the bank uses data ethically, and that it doesn’t slip into the hands of criminals.
Flesh-and-blood relationships are equally apparent around another ethical cornerstone at UniCredit: sustainability. To be clear, data and the means to analyse it can do much to prod the bank towards a greener future. For one thing, it allows the institution to analyse green-related risk far more speedily than traditional number-crunching – especially useful given the arrival of the EU taxonomy alongside other onerous regulatory hurdles. For another, it permits UniCredit sustainability bods to map the progress of clients on their respective sustainability journeys. Yet once again, Dasgupta can’t hope to lean on computers alone. Given customer corporate data is by definition proprietary, UniCredit still needs to ask them to provide it, or else rely on third-party data vendors. To put it differently, though data, and technology, are certainly crucial pillars of the bank’s future, don’t expect Dasgupta to forsake human wisdom just yet, another precept his medieval forebears would surely understand. ●
Future Banking /
www.nsbanking.com
UniCredit
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