Why data and analytics is so significant for Wells Fargo

FOR THE PAST three years, the banking giant has embarked on a journey termed as Data Management and Insights, to compile the data into a central enterprise data environment by organising it in multiple domains

- Moumita Deb Choudhury

Wells Fargo, the broad-based financial services company enjoys a customer base of around 70 million due to its sheer services. Analytics is obviously a big piece for any financial company, but at Wells Fargo, the importance of analytics is at a different level as it is heavily invested in and aims to achieve, not just vanilla but cutting-edge analytics. "To be able to do analytics at any place, you need to have the right data. The data must be organised in a shape and form that can be meaningfully used and explored to be able to execute analytics," says Prahalad Thota, Head of Enterprise Analytics & Data Science, Wells Fargo.

There is tons of data pouring in from different financial services and products and there are various channels through which it comes. Hence volumes of data remain unorganised in different places. “The challenge that arose was that all the data was residing at different places,” says Thota. That is when he felt that centralisation of data is the key.

Centralised data

For the past three years, the banking giant has embarked on a journey which they have termed it as 'Data Management and Insights', to compile the data into a central enterprise data environment by organising it in 17 domains. For example, the customer data is clubbed in one domain, the risk data in another domain, and so on. "This journey, over the last three years has been ongoing using some of the latest technologies from big data environment to compile the data and then essentially asking, the question of what are the kinds of analytics that we should be using,” points out Thota.