How RBS is 'wrangling' big data' to improve customer service

Christian Nelissen tells Computing how a Silicon Valley start-up is boosting the bank's big data capabilities

Big data is big business, especially when your organisation has millions of customers like the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS).

Christian Nelissen, head of data analytics, is responsible for handling that customer data and for him and his team of more than 1,000 managing it is no small task.

"If you're in a customer-facing part of the business and need to understand what customers are doing, develop a new product or change the way the business model works, you'll turn to one of my guys to help," he tells Computing.

Known as RBS's ‘data guy', Nelissen is leading the bank's big data journey as it strives to innovate away from a "very traditional" data architecture centred on an enterprise data warehouse.

"As we started working with unstructured data we wanted to be able to be much more flexible, operate much more quickly and also recognise the landscape was changing really quickly and we wanted to respond to that," he says.

That led RBS to look at how smaller software providers could bring benefits to the bank and its customers.

"As an organisation we realised we've underplayed our ability to work with start-ups in the fintech space. So we set up an outreach office in Silicon Valley and started looking at what was around and through that we connected with Trifacta," he explains.

Based in San Francisco and founded as a research project between Berkeley and Stanford universities, Trifacta describes its mission as "to simplify the way people work with data".

RBS really liked what the company had to offer, says Nelissen.

"They were a good fit both in terms of the technology and the people running the business," he says. "We put them in a process against some of the bigger vendors and they still came out on top, so that gave us even more confidence it was the right track to go down."

For RBS, deploying Trifacta was about "the desire to be super responsive and to get hold of all the data we have on our customers so that we can help them do what they want to do with us," Nelissen says, adding that it's also about "trying to do something different within the organisation in terms of how it operates with vendors in the space".

RBS has already seen benefits, Nelissen says. By analysing data through Trifacta, the company has been able to make alterations to products in days rather than months.

"There was something quite important that we asked Trifacta to help us out with in a future release," he explains.

"It wasn't so much how the change was made, but the way my team responded to that which was important because you realise it doesn't take months, it takes weeks and if you work like that internally then there's the possibility of changing the way we do technology," Nelissen continues.

"We're wrangling data, some of which we could have done internally but it would have taken months, if not years, to work with and we're now doing that in weeks."

Trifacta is enabling RBS to interrogate new datasets, he goes on, "giving us a capability we didn't have before and we're using it to make a difference to our customer experience".

One area in which crunching big data has aided RBS and its customers is through analysing information within web chats between the bank's employees and customers.

"We get a lot of information from our customers. We have web chat teams and a lot of conversations that go on in them produce a lot of metadata in our traditional structured environment, our ability to work with that data was close to zero," Nelissen explains. "Now we're able to get all of that web chat data in and have a look at it."

This resulted in RBS discovering that despite being a primarily UK-based organisation, people were chatting with it from around the globe, which has already altered how RBS approaches the tool.

"Even just that simple piece of web data raises the question of why people are coming through web chat from around the world and what we can do differently to help those customers who are outside of the UK," says Nelissen.

Nelissen describes the decision to opt for Trifacta as "a bit of a punt", but says he and RBS are pleased with the impact it has had on the business.

"Everything that's happened since has confirmed it was the right decision for us and we've really seen the benefits of going with somebody who has a great product, really cares about the build and cares about the customers," he concludes.

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