'Put data into the hands of people and show them how to use it'

Ikano Bank, started by the founder of IKEA, has for the last 2 years been in a major transformation, probably the most fundamental in our history so far. Together we are making a comprehensive change, creating a more commercially relevant bank where we provide our customers with accessible financial services.

It is a journey to serve our current and future markets while at the same time performing a large-scale technology shift. When doing major changes in processes and technology, it is bound to have an impact on data. We caught up with Fredrik Lilliebladh to understand how we are using the change to become more data-driven.

Hi Fredrik!

Ikano Bank is transforming heavily. New technology is implemented, and processes are changed in all areas of the Bank, is it wise to do major changes in the data area at the same time?

In many ways, the transformation in other areas is creating one new bank with harmonised systems and processes. Coming from a history of having worked with data in silos per market and function, the changes provide a fantastic opportunity to really set a strong foundation for how we are using data for analytical purposes for the future.

About two years ago we set a new data strategy outlining a few but distinct focus areas in which we needed a capability uplift to meet the ambitions of our business strategy. It could be summarised as “putting data into the hands of the people in the Bank and showing them how to use it”. The overall transformation roadmap then offered us the way to roll out the new capabilities as it passes through our different markets.

The areas of capability uplift, can you tell us a little bit about them? Technology and cloud must be one of them also for the data area?

Yes, for sure. Especially when looking at the more advanced user cases coming from our business, it was obvious that we needed technology that offered both stronger functional features as well as scale in a way that is not possible on-prem. So, during the past year and a half, we have been implementing our new cloud enterprise data platform by using AWS native technology. The first integrations for our new data lake (used for storing and exposing raw data) went live end of last year, and now during the spring our data warehouse/data mart setup (to be used for reporting and self-service data) went live.

The new platform is great for us, but not just from a technology perspective. It also gives us a common platform from which we can provision all the data from the new bank systems for analytical purposes. This enables us to harmonise our data solution landscape into fewer solutions and break down the historic silos of data.

Continuing on the capability uplift, there is an initiative called “Data for the people”, what is that about?

This initiative brings the data to life by showing our data consumers how to start working with it. This is regardless of if you are an advanced user consuming raw data from our data lake or if you are consuming data through our prebuilt data visualisations or data marts.

Part of the initiative is also the establishment of a community for the different types of data consumers (and producers). We host both internal and external inspirational sessions and it is particularly great to see how different areas of the Bank (previously working in silos) now are working on the same data and inspire each other on use cases for how to get insight from and value out of, the data.

So that covers both “put data into the hands of people” and “show them how to use it”. Does that conclude your transformational activities?

Almost! We have one more data-related focus area in which we as a company are investing a lot of time and it is data governance. I know that data governance has a bit of a bad ring to it, but it is fundamental to have it in place for any company that wants to be data-driven (since you otherwise cannot trust the data). We did some major changes in our data governance structure last year, focusing more on the aspects of using data governance for business purposes and focusing on establishing ownership, creating a common language and data quality.

Everyone who has worked with data governance knows that it is not uncommon to be faced with resistance from business leaders when it comes to accepting ownership of data and the responsibility that comes with it. The rollout of our revised structure has however been a positive experience and I am quite proud to work in an organisation where business leaders understand that ownership and utilisation of data is part of being a leader in the digital age.

Thank you, Fredrik, for sharing. Keep the data coming.