Tell us a little about yourself.

I live in San Francisco with my wife, our daughter and our cat, who was just a kitten when I started at Citizens. I grew up in Bombay but now self-identify as a Bay Area person (go Warriors!) and I’ve been enjoying getting to know New England.

What are the biggest trends you’re seeing in Data & Analytics?

I’d point to four areas:

1. Human + Machine > Human
2. Analytics becomes increasingly self-service
3. Data is still the differentiator
4. Cloud native solutions are now table-stakes

Where it’s taken a dramatic turn is GenAI – the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022 – somebody put a machine out there that we can interact with like we would another human being. It has massive compute power and infinite memory. It allows us to do more and the possibilities in this space are huge.

Why is data & analytics important to Citizens’ success?

For me our data & analytics work is about setting us up to be able to make differentiated, granular decisions. Data management and the ability to use it in a strategic way is becoming even more important.

Think about this: how often do companies come up with a great idea and then they discover that they can’t act on their ideas because the data is not in the right place? The ability to manage your data effectively, and importantly, making it available for decision makers and decision-making applications at the right place and time, is what will determine whether you can successfully act on ideas.

The work our team has done to bring our data together, making it easy to access and well managed is a big step in getting us to a place of being able to use analytics more effectively. But data work never ends. There will always be new challenges (privacy comes to mind as an increasingly important area).

The data marketplace the team has built is one shining achievement. And colleagues across the bank are using it. Usage has increased 5-15x in the last year– that’s mind blowing!

The journey to the cloud is critical. Citizens Next Gen Tech initiative set us up for success in this space and I think we’re on the right track.

How does the organization plan to upskill our colleagues to be consumers of data?

You can have the best tools, or you can have the best infrastructure, but without the right people you won’t get the value and drive a lot of the work you need to do. It’s going to be an incomplete attempt. Our community of Citizens data analytics practitioners, professionals who consume data analytics, and those who are enablers of data analytics - it's because of their work that value becomes unlocked for our customers and for the company.

We need to have a data-first mindset across Citizens. Getting to sophisticated decision making first starts with thinking analytically about what we’re setting out to do. What are the key drivers and root causes of customer behavior? How can we influence these drivers? All of this requires a lot of investment in our people, to enable them to use the data capabilities more effectively.

“To meet the rapid changes in customer needs and advances in technology, we have embarked on an enterprise-wide transformation of our data & analytics capabilities to build differentiated decision making to drive business and customer value.” - Krish Swamy, Chief Data & Analytics Officer

Data & Analytics is offered as one of our Citizens Academies, to prepare our colleagues for the future with upskilling against in-demand data and analytics capabilities, that will propel the performance and growth of Citizens. Curated learnings are compiled from a wide array of data and analytics experts on topics like Data Visualization, Data Modeling, and Differentiated Insights - to name a few.

In addition, over 1,000 colleagues and counting have joined the race to build skills with special access to DataCamp's extensive library of learning content. We’ve invested in this unique learning experience to allow our colleagues the ability to earn badges, explore topics of interest (such as prompt engineering, predictive analytics, programming in SQL and Python, and more) and complete practice activities for hands-on learning. Whether you’re interested in learning the basics of data and analytics or are looking for advanced opportunities with Python, SQL and more, there’s something for everyone.

Congrats to Krish on his recognition as one of the top thought leaders in the AI industry from H2O.ai based on his innovative approach and dedication to leveraging AI to enhance performance in areas like fraud, marketing, bank operations, and credit risk in banking. Read more about this honor in American Banker here. 

Help shape the future of data and analytics at Citizens and check out our open roles!