Data Leaders Who's Who: Craig Turrell

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Craig Turrell

Head of P2P Digital Centre of Excellence, Standard Chartered Bank

Financial services are a hotbed of innovation, focused on delivering better and more reliable customer experiences. Craig Turrell, Head of P2P Digital Centre of Excellence at Standard Chartered Bank, has turned data and AI into an award-winning point of competitive differentiation for the bank, by finding the right solutions (such as AIpowered data science platform, Dataiku), and focusing on leveraging the innovation to deliver all-new experiences to the bank and its customers.

During this interview, Craig shares a wealth of information in answering the following questions:

Can you tell me how the last couple years have led to the development of your real-time data analytics platform?

It started with speed. There was an understanding within senior management that digital adoption and transformation relies on people choosing digital, because it's the most efficient choice. And yet we still had quite high bounce rate. People were accessing digital products and then not going on to use them in the long term. We looked into what was causing that, and what we found at the core of that was the first problem is speed.

We worked with MIT to understand that the magic number is one second, and if you want to build something that is efficient and that people truly interact with, then the application must interact back with you within one second. At four seconds, 20 per cent of people will look for something else and may never come back to you. At ten seconds 80 per cent of people will abandon you. At the time, we were delivering data that would sometimes take over one minute to deliver

Can you further explain how you addressed this challenge?

Your brain doesn't recognise anything below a second. If you want to interact with something in a natural way, so that your brain is not thinking about the machines at work, it needs to meet that one second threshold, as anything below a second that your brain doesn’t recognise that the process happened.

After one second, your brain will recognise there was a delay. The longer the delay, the more likely it is that you’ll lose people. Now, yes, if you've got a captive process, if it's the only thing they've got to work with, then they’re not going to have a choice. You're just going to torture people with inefficient processes. But as a rule, you really do want to investigate the design experiences, and therefore you're really trying to design for that one- to four second window.

Getting it right down to one second is, is difficult, but giving yourself that boundary to one- to four seconds means that you're going to make most people happy most of the time.

That wasn’t the only problem that you were facing, was it?

The other problem was, we were mining over about 10 million to 15 million records of data in any piece of financial information. The reality is that that’s almost nothing. That was just looking at the “now”. If we needed to look five years back, we are looking at something around 11 trillion possible pieces of data. If we wanted to also look forwards, it goes to eight quintillion records. The joke is we were looking at an elephant through a microscope, and we just could not see anything.

It was these two things that drove our first initial ideas and drew us to the Dataiku platform. We also knew intelligence would come next, and we were concerned that we would solve the first two, and then we would have to reinvent or separately create AI, and then bring it back into the system.

Craig also shared his thoughts on:

• How did you go about designing the experience?

• How do you explain the difference between the amount of data required of humans and machines?

• Why was it important to you that your data strategy could be utilised by the most technical person right down to the least?

• Finally, when developing any innovative technology, failure is part of the process. What are your thoughts on that?

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