Ep. 237: Murli Buluswar | From Analytics to Outcomes: Creating Data-Driven Insights at Citi

How does democratizing intelligence enhance productivity and drive smarter decision-making?

Murli Buluswar, Citigroup’s Head of Analytics for the US Personal Bank, joins host Rob Markey to explore Citi’s strategies for democratizing intelligence. Murli emphasizes building a conversational intelligence platform that enables proactive and reactive insights to reduce friction between curiosity, insight, and decision-making. This approach enhances organizational efficiency, boosts productivity, and sparks more complex problem-solving.

Taking a scientific approach, Citi treats customer experience as a key growth strategy. Murli shares how small improvements in customer experience can boost long-term retention and how investing in marketing to existing customers offers quick returns.

Citi's in-house Journey Analytics engine integrates financial transactions, customer information, external data, and internal algorithms to identify opportunities that enhance the customer experience. This innovative approach to decision-making—a mere dream five years ago—is now a reality, delivering significant customer value and better business results.

Guest: Murli Buluswar, Head of Analytics, US Personal Banking, Citigroup 

Host: Rob Markey, Partner, Bain & Company

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Time-stamped list of topics covered:

• (1:07) High-level business overview for context
• (1:53) The democratization of intelligence
• (4:49) Clarifying Murli’s role vs. that of a chief data and analytics officer
• (6:25) The transformation and aggregation of disaggregated teams within Citi—and the need for a global solution
• (11:42) Customer health index
• (19:59) Framework to examine actions, forecast outcomes, and bring more intentionality to decision-making
• (32:30) Automated aberration detection
• (37:25) Career reflections and parting thoughts

Time-stamped list of notable quotes

• (4:21) “We are building a conversational intelligence platform that allows people to interact with data. There's both the proactive identification of things we might not have conceptualized. And there's the—dare I say—reactive component of, ‘I have a question and I want to ask the engine.’”
• (6:00) “That's why this notion of democratization of intelligence is important to me. If I can enable the organization to whet its curiosity and its appetite independently, and then rely on my team as we get to the third and fourth layer of sophistication, then I've improved productivity and have freed up time and energy to focus on higher-order problem-solving.”
• (7:19) “Perhaps about 80% of the team was focused on followership, 20% on partnership, and maybe essentially next to 0% on leadership.”
• (10:30) “We ended up building a software tool that essentially democratized decision-making across finance, product marketing, and my team.”