Macquarie Bank chases data-driven view of its customers

Macquarie Bank is continuing its pursuit of a 360-degree view of clients, threading disparate pieces of data collected during interactions in a way that will aid in long-term relationship building.

Head of wealth and business banking analytics Keya Mukherjee told an FST Media and Tableau webinar last month that the customer is always “priority number one”, and data insights increasingly helped the bank maintain that commitment and focus.

Mukherjee said that customer insights had previously led to a streamlining of digital account opening processes, and the addition of tools such as for budgeting into the bank’s app.

“A lot of the data that the customer is sharing with us, we are creating insights with and then sharing it back to the customers,” she said.

However, she noted more broadly a trend within the banking sector to use data to better understand customers and their needs, and to deepen their relationship with their bank.

The challenge for banks was to bring this data together in such a way that it is consumable by different parts of the bank, as well as by external brokers or financial advisors, such that it is useful in relationship-building.

“The [customer] data that gets generated often resides in disparate systems, and to get the data together consolidated in one group is a Herculean task,” Mukherjee said.

“That’s something that Macquarie has been doing right now. We’ve consolidated eight data stores and we’re on a cloud based platform, but there’s still a way to go in terms of how we thread the pieces of information that the client is sharing with us while they’re interacting with our products and services or our CX or our ops teams.

“That alone is extremely important to build that 360-degree view or one complete view of the client, so we can know their needs and serve them better. 

“That to my mind is the biggest challenge - how do we connect the data, clean the data and get the data into a format so that we can build insights to cater to the 360-degree view of the client?”

Mukherjee said that Tableau played a key role in making customer data broadly consumable and available to all the different teams with an interest in building a long-term relationship with the client.

The bank has previously discussed using Tableau as the basis for a ‘next-best action’ suggestive system for its sales, marketing and customer service teams to engage with clients more effectively.

“Understanding the customer, the engagement and the drivers of engagement with that customer is extremely important today, and that’s what data tells you,” Mukherjee said.

Mukherjee said that her team often shopped prototype reports to frontline teams to ‘test-and-learn’ on what types of insights would be useful and actionable for them.

She added that Macquarie Bank wanted to build a culture where a “data lens” is applied to all decision-making.

“If the insight isn’t working out or leading to an actionable outcome, then we need to understand what we need to do to get it to an actionable outcome,” she said.

“That’s [a direction] I’ve witnessed in Macquarie, where when we do make any decision, we have it backed by data.”

She said in the future that the “whole thing of data to insights to action, and its cycle, will need to be stronger and quicker”, meaning there is still more for the bank to do to perfect its use of data.