VIDEO | Fifth Third Bank CDO: The Less Techy You Can Make it, the More Successful You Can Be

(US and Canada) Nate Murray, Chief Data Officer of Fifth Third Bank, speaks with Diane Saucier, Financial Services Director at Pure Storage, in a video interview about balancing transformative efforts with defensive use cases, the role of a CDO as a change agent, and enabling self-service.

Murray states that organizations need a constant push and pull of offense and defensive efforts. He explains that the outcomes from an offensive or a defensive standpoint have different stakeholders who have completely different mentalities. A CDO has to sit in both the camps and create an organizational model that allows them to do both successfully.

Further, Murray reveals that Fifth Third Bank has two regulatory-facing tribes for compliance, and regulations, and two offensive-facing tribes for innovation, return on investment, or digital. This allows the team to bifurcate the organization and still stay focused on the tech stacks, outcomes, and stakeholders.

Speaking on his role as a CDO, Murray says that he is a transformation and modernization agent and that it is more about building the culture that embeds data in day-to-day jobs. He stresses that the role is about being a talent export function for teaching the strategies, frameworks, and direction to individuals all across the various lines of business. He says that this approach is a lot more successful in achieving scale and exponential reach.

Sharing his approach to enabling self-service with secure and compliant access to data for business users, Murray says that it is about capabilities. He suggests that it is about capabilities like tokenizing data, managing access, moving and integrating data, and visualization, and wrapping them within a simple UI. It has to be less techy, repeatable, automated, and reusable for the end user.

The less techy it is, the more chance it can have at success, Murray concludes.

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