VIDEO | Absa Bank Kenya CDO: I Believe I Am CDO Version 3.0

(Middle East and Africa) Hartnell Ndungi, Chief Data Officer of Absa Bank Kenya PLC speaks with Robert Lutton, Vice President, Sandhill Consultants and Editorial Board Vice Chair at CDO Magazine, in a video interview about his professional background, the transformation of the CDO role, and the importance of leveraging data in today’s business environment.

Ndungi has a background in electrical and electronics engineering. He began his career as an IT consultant and was hired by KPMG Kenya, where he focused on bank risk consulting and IT advisory. Additionally, Ndungi was one of the first data leaders employed by a bank, where he learned about sales, business growth, and finance transformation. He is also among the first chief data officers in Eastern Central Africa.

Regarding the CDO role’s transformation, Ndungi says he is CDO version 3.0. He explains that CDO 1.0 looks only at data management; CDO 2.0 looks at analytics, business intelligence, and data management; and CDO 3.0 looks at data science, visual intelligence, modern analytics, and business intelligence.

Ndungi states that data is now a survival tool for all businesses because they must have insights and information to plan, budget, and prepare for the future. He elaborates that data is essential for growth, transformation, and competition.

Ndungi says there are multiple ways to define and prioritize use cases for data initiatives. He offers data leaders the following as a simple approach:

• Understand that a data use case is a business problem that can be solved using data and analytics.
• Meet with business counterparts and learn about their problems, critical processes, customers and growth ambitions, and how you can contribute.

He also explains that an artificial intelligence use case for the credit card business has to start with understanding card users’ behavior. This is necessary to develop a system to automatically add credit card users’ limits by cross-checking their ability to pay.

CDO Magazine appreciates Hartnell Ndungi for sharing his insights and data success stories with our global community.