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Deep in the heart of Texas, a consortium of professionals from the retail banking industry met last week for the seventh annual Consumer Bankers Association (CBA) LIVE conference. While a majority of the conference’s 1,400 attendees represent organizations across the financial services industry, they appear to share similar challenges, interests, and concerns. Specifically, keynotes and highly-attended track sessions focused on key themes, including what the current political climate means for regulatory bodies such as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), how the relationship between banks and fintech companies is evolving, and how banks should be leveraging digital channels to create engaging customer experiences. Here are my three key takeaways from this year’s CBA LIVE conference:

This year, Enterprise Data World (EDW) took their conference to the Omni Hotel in Atlanta, GA. EDW examines the latest trends in the world of data—especially in regards to data governance and data quality. This event focused on leveraging data as an asset and bringing IT and business users together to make better decisions for their enterprises. The keynote speakers focused on the emergence of the Chief Data Officer (CDO) within organizations, the importance of having a foundation of high quality data, data modeling, and much more. 

Last week, I had the opportunity to speak with Mike Delgado from Experian for a ‘Data Talk’ interview. We chatted about the 2017 Global Data Management Benchmark Report, and you can see the video of that interview in this post. 

NameSearch is Experian Data Quality’s premier matching solution that can accurately and efficiently identify duplicates within your systems. NameSearch uses fuzzy matching to identify records that lead to the same individual, despite the misspellings, nicknames, typos, extra, or missing information across a single or multiple databases. It’s useful for organizations in any vertical that might require a matching solution, and, because of that, it is highly customizable.

Reading the statistics on cart abandonment rates can be quite sobering. Sixty-seven percent of online carts are abandoned before a purchase is made and, apparently, about 97 percent of mobile carts are abandoned. The reasons oft quoted are myriad but one of the bigger issues is simply the time it takes to check out; the longer it takes, the more likely that your customer will become distracted. Plus, when the shopping process requires any significant amount of typing on a mobile, forget it! Although you have to find a way to enable accurate address capture and to collect other important information, requiring customers to input too much is surely one reason that the mobile abandonment rate is so high.

The digital economy is coming, says IDC, and traditional organizations will need to adapt in order to stay relevant—and fast! This new economy, which is facilitated by technologies such as the cloud, artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, and augmented and virtual reality, is rapidly changing the way business is done both here in the U.S. and abroad. According to IDC’s research, 33 percent of the current U.S. economy is digitized, and by 2020 (just three years away) they predict that 50 percent of the global 2,000 will see a majority of their businesses digitized.

This week I was able to attend the Gartner Data and Analytics Summit in Dallas. For those of you who weren’t able to join this meeting of data professionals, I thought I would share a few of my key take-aways from the event.

At Experian Data Quality, we’re passionate about giving back to our community and building the next generation of leaders. On February 16, 2017, we did just that by hosting a fundraiser to support a local nonprofit, YouthBuild. The Boston-area organization helps low-income individuals reclaim their education and build the skills they need to thrive in employment. According to the organization, there are “at least 2.3 million low-income 16-24 year-olds in the United States who are not in education, employment, or training.” YouthBuild aims to service this population and help to unlock their potential.

I recently received an email from Hubway, the bike-share program here in Boston. The subject read “Join the 2017 Hubway Data Challenge presented by Microsoft – over $7,500 in prizes.” Now for a little bit of background information, I am a regular user of Hubway. I live next to a docking station, so to get to work every day I take it to the nearest subway stop, which also has a docking station. I do this again on my way back home each night. On the weekends, I sometimes take it to the gym, which conveniently has two docking stations within walking distance. On a few occasions, my wife and I will bike from Fenway Park after a baseball game to the closest Red Line subway station to avoid the foot traffic. Let’s just say I use it a lot.