(US and Canada) Purvi Shah, VP, Enterprise Data Platforms, American Express, speaks with Leonard Maganza, Chief Customer Officer, Syniti, about her career journey, data management, data quality issues, and using data as a strategic asset.

Early in her career,  Shah was responsible for classifying search engine queries by going through reams of search data and seeing how it could be used as an asset.

She is in charge of the data across all of the lines of business for American Express globally. It includes merchant data, customer data, and commercial business data. She describes it as an area where data is made available for the right purposes in an organized manner to end-users. Shah says that Amex leadership realized the value of the data early on and developed multiple products based on the data.

She says that the value of data improves with understanding, governance, and having the right level of access controls. The goal is to make it easy for the end-users. It concerns the entire ecosystem of how data is managed from capture and collection to organizing and making it available as a product.

Shah emphasizes that there is a lot to be done regarding data quality, and there is a need to scale data quality practices and measurements to ensure that the anomalies are detected and addressed on time. 

In her view, data needs to be treated as a strategic asset. She cites the example of how Amex leveraged years of data to create products like financial relief programs and loan products to help out customers.

Not having the balance and controls in the right places as the data moves through complex ecosystems is a pitfall she recalls from her own past experiences. This can result in truncation, leading to poor experiences for customers. So, it is necessary to monitor and track data proactively and resolve a problem before it becomes an issue.