Sep 18, 2018
THE CHANGING BANKING LANDSCAPE – Michael Galvin meets with Precision Sourcing to talk Data, Transaction banking and his approach solving problems for large corporates.
What is your role?
My role is identifying challenges within large corporate organisations across the health, retail, telco, media and entertainment sectors. Essentially, to keep an eye on the changing banking landscape. I work with clients to better understand their challenges, solve unique business problems and build efficiencies into their operations. This could be relating to business processes, payments, analytics or overall business requirements. We look to help organisations remove manual steps from workflows, identify ways to improve reconciliation, or enable better connectivity between them and their suppliers.
What is different now compared to when you started your career?
The whole payments and transaction banking landscape has completely changed. When I first started in banking 17 years ago, we focused purely on core transaction banking services and payment instruments. Whilst these core services are critical, these days they are simply a part of a greater eco-system of technology and consultative services.
Data analytics has also become a pivotal part of our offering with online and in-store retail in particular. The industry will continue to evolve and retailers need partners now to help them reduce churn and acquire new customers faster at the lowest possible cost.
Cost effective retention and customer growth is absolutely critical for the retail and telco sector, they continue to battle with sliding margins, higher rents and overheads. It’s a tough time out there. In the changing banking landscape, our approach to analytics complement our client’s customer experience goals.
If you could give one-piece advice to a company trying to do more with their data what would it be?
Commit to working with your data provider on recurring subscription data projects. This not only enables successful monitoring of campaigns, it also allows you to tweak campaigns as you identify new opportunities. This is important for one simple reason, demographics, behaviours and trends change, businesses need to monitor and make changes in a timely manner. Look beyond how you’ve used data in the past and consider new ways to understand behaviours and trends.
What surprises you most about big corporates and how they use their data?
Not a surprise so much, mainly an observation – no matter what industry you’re in, organisations have so much data these days and access to vast amounts of information. When people talk data pools it can be very overwhelming for businesses on where to start mining and slicing their data to present it in a meaningful way. The discussions I have had with businesses start with the need and their end-customer road-map. For example with the retail and telco space, what are the in-store and online strategies? Is customer churn an issue?
Having the tools to present data in a single view is also a challenge for some corporates. Some hosting solutions come at a huge cost but there are economical ways to present data and tailor it to your audience. I work with clients every day to workshop their data analytic needs, it’s a great part of my job.
What are your differentiators?
In real-estate you hear the phrase ‘location, location, location. As banking and technology professionals, we are all about ‘approach, approach, approach’ and the approach we take at CommBank is very different.
By continually identifying and prioritising challenges directly with our clients, we can assist businesses solve problems. At CommBank we have access to so many resources, facilities, data scientists and leading industry solutions, just a few benefits of working for the largest retail bank in Australia. Combined with our approach, our proposition becomes a very powerful one as we go about helping customers solve problems. If you’ve visited our innovation lab you’ll know what I mean. If you haven’t I can arrange a tour.
What is it you love about data (as a non-technical person) and how do you find wading through the techy world?
There are so many interesting techy engineers, analysts and scientists that are really tapping into behavioral analytics. I love listening to how all of these data professionals interpret data differently. Each data project I have been involved with starts at the customer need, when we present the findings back, it is only the beginning of the opportunity for our client. Data generates so many ideas and possibilities.
There are many thought leaders in this space globally that are adding so much value across the whole data chain and it is great to be part of that journey CommBank in Australia.
Connect with Michael on Linkedin or at Michael.Galvin@cba.com.au
