E71 - Kshira Saagar - On Achieving Organisation-Wide Data Literacy

Kshira Saagar is the first Chief Data Officer (CDO) of Latitude Financial Services. Latitude is Australia’s biggest non-bank lender, digital payments, and finance company with over 2.7 million customers across Australia and New Zealand.

At Latitude, Kshira is currently working on enabling the enterprise to make faster and smarter data-driven decisions. Kshira oversees all the data science processes and infrastructure from data collection and governance to algorithmic decision tools development.

He is also working on developing self-service data analytics capabilities for the Latitude staff and other advanced and intelligent analytics products. Kshira is leading a large team of data scientists, analysts, architects, engineers, machine learning engineers, data warehouse developers, BI developers and data governance & risk remediation experts.

Before Latitude, Kshira had performed in different senior and leadership data roles at Global Fashion Group, Equifax, Fairfax Media, and Mu Sigma Inc. He has over a decade of experience in data science solution development and analytics problem-solving for retail, telecom and insurance markets, including fortune 100 clients. He also has professional data analytics experience in media, healthcare, aviation, logistics, and FMCG industries.

He is also a Member Of The Board Of Advisors at YouPay, an alternative payment solution in Australia.

Kshira was recognised as one of the Top Australian analytics leaders by the Institute of Analytics Professionals of Australia (IAPA) for three consecutive years since 2019.

In this exclusive episode, Kshira shares with us how he is enabling the enterprise to make faster and smarter data-driven decisions.

• The interview starts with Kshira telling a brief history of Latitude Financial Services.
• How it has been helping millions of customers in Australia, often from behind the scenes.
• How without the physical footprint, like the traditional banks, the company has been growing a loyal customer base
• Does being fully digital make the company more data-driven and agile. If so, then, how?
• How does the company face similar challenges as any traditional company?
• How the senior leadership and a smart decision-making process helps the business to overcome the challenges.
• Work that Kshira has been putting in to build the data analytics capabilities of the company.
• Kshira also shares his views on how an organization can build and support self-service analytics capabilities.
• He shares with us a simple framework of TEA – tools, education, and access.
• Self-service not only means access to dashboards but also open access to discovery and engineering.
• Tips and strategies for increasing data literacy and strong data penetration within the organisation.
• Approach and framework for analytics capability development for a brand new product as well as risk management and avoiding data bias.
• The critical aspects of personalization vs data ethics.
• What the company should be doing to make the customers understand the organizational efforts to protect customer data and privacy.

If you are a senior manager or an executive leader who wants to develop centralized data and analytics capabilities and a centralised chief data office, this is the episode for you.

If you are a data analytics practitioner tasked with building brand new data analytics capabilities from scratch without any playbook, you will also benefit hugely from Kshira’s guidance.

BusinessAnalytics, DataAnalytics, MachineLearning, DataLiteracy, CustomerExperience, DataScience