The Evolution of Analytics with Data

Jeremy Coughlin, Vice President, Enterprise Analytics, Coast Capital Savings

Jeremy Coughlin, Vice President, Enterprise Analytics, Coast Capital Savings

Jeremy Coughlin is the VP, Enterprise Analytics for Coast Capital Savings, where he is responsible for enabling the organization to effectively leverage data. He has a background in Psychology (BSc.) and business (MBA) and has been an analytics professional for over 20 years. Jeremy is also a board member for Technical Safety BC, as well as a volunteer board member for the Vancouver Analytics Board and the North Delta Sunfish swim club.

How has Data Analytics space evolved over the years?

Business operations have long benefited from data analytics. However, in today’s world, as the functions and methods utilized to create, collect, and use data have all advanced significantly. As a result, data analytics are now seen as a tool that may help us stand out from the competition and give our consumers more value.

For instances, I work for Coast Capital Savings, a credit union that has approximately 600,000 members and is the largest credit union in Canada by number of members. The biggest problem of credit unions is that people don’t know really what they are or why they’re different than banks and so that’s why most people as they don’t understand credit unions, they don’t pay much attention.

Credit unions do is all the same things as banks that we offer, mortgages, and bank accounts and debit cards and credit cards, all the same thing, but we are member owned. That means we are not beholden to our shareholders and the only person that we’re looking to serve is our members. So that is very fundamentally different. So when you look at say the banks they’re interested in potentially like say raising fees for, to increase shareholder profits, whereas that’s not our interest. So once you explain that to someone, they may consider a credit union.

"Its most important thing is to align your work with the vision of your organization"

The reason why people don’t know credit unions now is because when credit unions really came to be, they were essentially serving what’s called the underserved. So the underserved or under banked were people that they lived in like remote geographic communities, or they had work like fishermen that like didn’t really have good money flows and banks didn’t like working with them. So credit unions came up so that groups of people could come together and buy houses and things like that. But now the world has changed a lot and now things like geographical isolation, they’re not the same. So when people look and say, well, why would you know, why does a credit union make sense anymore that’s where data comes in. And so, again, going back to this idea that banks and any kind of most, corporation, they’re using data there to make profits for the shareholders, their owners. Whereas the credit union, our only goal of course, is to make our members financial lives better. And so we are looking to use data in the same kind of way only to make their lives better. So that’s why data’s so important in my role. And so that’s kind of driving all of the things that I do.

What are some of the challenges in Data Analytics space and how can you effectively mitigate those challenges?

As our whole practice is now moving into the cloud the biggest challenge we face today is finding people that have good cloud experience is it’s hard. As through my experience I have seen that we have had many open positions kind of all the time but finding good talent to compete with the companies likes Amazon and Facebook is very hard to find. So we are spend a lot of our energy, recruiting and finding the right talent and are also spending more time in creating training materials, creating documentation, hiring more junior people and, and being a place where people can grow and learn.

What are some of the technological trends that are influencing Enterprise Analytics market today?

So the technology landscape has become so complex and it’s moving so quickly that the, one of the biggest challenges you find is by the time you’re even starting a project that you said, you identified a need, you found a tool, you found people to do it, you got budget, you get everything organized, you’re starting the project And like, as you’re starting it, you realize something new came out and you might want to change what you’re doing, because there’s already another way to do things that might even be better.

So you’re constantly rethinking your plan You’re constantly saying, well, should we shift gears or should we just get this done and then see where we’re at then. so that just rapid changing and that just of different options and tools a creates a very complex scenario to manage. cause there’s many right ways to do things so how do you know what’s the best one for your organization and there’s lots of right answers. So it it’s very complex.

What are some of the best practices a business should to steer ahead of the competition to?

The most important thing is to align your work with the vision of your organization. for most people, there’s so many things that you can do and so many good things there’s so much work to do So how do you decide what, what you should do next or what you should focus on. So the most important thing I find is to really go down to the core mission that your organization is trying to achieve and focus there. As there’s so much noise everyone’s asking for all sorts of different data everyone’s asking for reports, everyone’s asking for so much. So how do you decide, what do you do to me? You look at those requests and you look at all the things that are around you and you, you put them up against your mission statement and you say, well, which ones are most closely aligned to the mission that we’re trying to drive. And then those are the things that we really focus on. And then you communicate that back to your stakeholders and say, listen, this is why we’re gonna do this first, because this is the way it connects with our, strategy. And although everything else is, they’re all good ideas.

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